Risky Regencies

Yale Center for British Art Redoux

Updated on March 14, 2011 by Diane Gaston

I’m still flying high from my trip to the Yale Center for British Art two weeks ago. I’ve blogged about the special Thomas Lawrence exhibit Victoria Hinshaw and I went to see, the place also has a treasure of other British art from the 18th and 19th century.

Here Vicky and I stand before a bust of Prinny (George IV), looking very Roman, however. Prinny, not us!

(Check out Vicky’s blogs from the trip at Number One London)

Here’s the most spectacular painting by George Stubbs (1724-1806). Stubbs is most famous for his paintings of horses and this one is brimming with action.

All the great portrait artists are represented:

Gainsborough

Reynolds

Hoppner

Copley

And another of my favorite artists of the period.

Turner

This museum was just wonderful. Everywhere I turned I found something spectacular to look at and almost all in “our” time period, give or take a few years!!

Have you ever visited a place that stayed with you like this? There is something about this artwork that just won’t let go of me. I felt this way about England when I visited, too.

On Wednesday I’ll be at eHarlequin talking about a certain kind of art, vedute, the souvenir paintings of the Grand Tour.

P.S. My heart goes out to all of Japan in the wake of the earthquake and tsunami. The devastation is massively horrible. May we all figure out some way to help. I lived in Japan as a child when my father was stationed there. I’ll blog about that on Diane’s Blog on Thursday.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged art | 8 Replies

Eccentrics

Updated on March 12, 2011 by Elena Greene

The recent awards season makes me think about famous eccentrics, what makes them eccentric and why we find them entertaining.

I have a theory. I think many of us secretly wish we could do something a little outrageous once in a while. For instance, I love some of the crazy clothing in the Harry Potter movies but would never dare to wear anything like that except to a costume party. Maybe that’s why we love eccentrics, because they appear to be genuinely having fun living an extraordinary life without concern for appearances.

Some eccentrics ring more true to me than others. I might be wrong, but I think people like Helena Bonham Carter and Johnny Depp are the real deal, genuinely a bit mad, and in a good way. Celebrities like Madonna and Lady Gaga (again I could be wrong) come across as more calculated, though they are entertaining in their way.

Many famous figures from the Regency could be considered eccentrics, from Prinny himself to Beau Brummell and other dandies like Poodle Byng. It’s harder for me to tell whether some of these characters donned their idiosyncrasies to get attention or whether they were as eccentric in private.

I think that many of Brummell’s shocking sayings (“Who’s your fat friend?”) were a calculated risk. However, his friend the Princess Frederica Charlotte, Duchess of York, “Freddie” to her friends, seems more of a genuine eccentric. Her marriage was unhappy and she lived in the country, at Oatlands in Surrey, lavishing affection on her pets, which included cats, dogs, birds and monkeys.

“The Duchess’s life is an odd one; she seldom has a female companion, she is read to all night and falls asleep towards morning, and rises about 3; feeds her dozens of dogs and her flocks of birds, &c., comes down two minutes before dinner, and so round again.” – Right Honourable John Wilson Croker, LL.D. F. R. S., Secretary to the Admiralty, 1818

Eccentrics in romance novels are usually secondary characters, the weird great aunt and the like. I’ve tried to think of major characters who are eccentric and came up with a few. Merlin Lambourn, the heroine from Laura Kinsale’s MIDSUMMER MOON is a brilliant inventor but seriously unworldly. I’d call Charles Harcourt, the hero from Judith Ivory’s BEAST, something of an eccentric as well.

Do you enjoy eccentrics? Which are your favorites, real, historical or fictional?

Elena

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Beast, Beau Brummell, Duchess of York, eccentrics, Helena Bonham Carter, Judith Ivory, Laura Kinsale, Midsummer Moon, Poodle Byng | 8 Replies

Kant Stop Reading Female Authors!

Updated on March 11, 2011 by megan

Last week I finally finished reading the eight books I was sent to judge for the RITA contest.

After that marathon, I said on Twitter, “I finished reading all EIGHT of my RITA books; now reading books by male authors only for awhile. Preferably where people die.” To which a snarky Twitter friend replied, “Oh, so you’re going to try reading like every literary critic in the world for a while.”

Ha! But then I thought about it, and realized that because of my reading tastes, I read primarily female authors. And then, when I strolled back through my reading history, I realized that while I haven’t eschewed male authors–Raymond Chandler, Neal Stephenson, Bernard Cornwell and P.G. Wodehouse are among my favorites–I have always peppered my reading with female authors. Even when I wasn’t reading romance.

Now, is this cool? Maybe. But I wish it were just something that could be, without looking to gender, or race, or any other marker of self to gauge a person’s output. I’ve always espoused the Kantian a priori method of critique, wherein you try to know as little about the item you are ingesting so as not to prejudice yourself.

(Sometimes it’s been a problem when I discover the author’s prejudices after I’ve inhaled the work–C.S. Lewis‘s Narnia series was distorted for me when I realized his deep religious beliefs formed the ideas. Knowing Jim Thompson was a drunk did help explain a lot, though).

I do wish it were less of a ‘thing’ for who is what and what they stand for. My own writing is definitely skewed because of my identity as a white Northeast-raised female living in the late 20th century, but I would hope you wouldn’t have to know that to appreciate my work. In fact, if you did have to know that, I’m doing something wrong.

The books I read, by the way, are HIGHLY recommended: Blood Oath by Christopher Farnsworth and The Black Prism by Brent Weeks (Carolyn first recommended him to me).

Anyway. Which is to say, who’s the last male author you read?

Megan

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Megan | 9 Replies

My job in the Regency

Updated on March 10, 2011 by Janet Mullany

The housekeeper came; a respectable-looking elderly woman, much less fine, and more civil, than she had any notion of finding her.

After Amanda’s exotic and glamorous plans to open a vampire bar, I thought I’d like to describe my ideal Regency job as a housekeeper.

Just imagine it. All that power! Solely in charge of the nutmeg and other spices and maybe even the tea, gliding silently around the corridors of the great house and coming upon servant hanky-panky, unless the slight jangling from your chatelaine betrayed your presence. This lovely example is from early eighteenth century Holland (I think. An ebay find which I couldn’t afford) with a St. Christopher motif.

Just the position if you were a gentlewoman widowed and down on her luck, like Mrs. Fairfax in Jane Eyre (and then I’d be Judi Dench too!).

Or even the unmarried and troublesome member of the family who needs to be shuffled off somewhere to learn the folly of her ways and spend some time brewing stuff in the stillroom.

Housekeepers got nice, fat salaries, too, augmented with tips from tourists if they worked in a great house. When Darcy’s housekeeper (the one described in my opening quote) finished showing Elizabeth and her aunt and uncle around, you may be absolutely sure she had her hand held out. It was quite a cottage industry.

What’s your ideal Regency job?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Darcy, housekeepers, Jane Eyre | 11 Replies

Getting Down and Dirty with the Nineteenth Century

Updated on March 9, 2011 by carolyn

A History of Erotic Literature by Patrick J. Kearney, MacMillan London, 1982.

A few interesting tidbits from this book (fyi, my combination of quotes and summary are in blockquotes here to distinguish from my general commentary.)

Between 1800 and 1850, Louis Perceau’s Bibliographie du roman erotique
lists 26 “separate and orignal works” whereas in the period 1851-1900 there are “almost seven times that number.”

In the early years of the 19th century there were a number of successful prosecutions for “obscene libel.”

My personal suspicion is that the Victorians were working so hard at NO SEX ever that the pressure was too much for some people and it came out in erotic writing — which if you have ever read Victorian erotica, oh lord. So repetitive and boring because there is little-to-no emotion. Did Regency folks write less of it because they were less repressed? Or were the prosecutions for “obscene libel” a deterrent? Or were people then still writing for private audiences and those MSS were never actually published, just handed around among friends?

George Cannon published erotica from 1815 to 1864. After his death, his wife continued the business until her death some 10 years later. In 1830, he was jailed for six months and fined 100 pounds for a volume of deSade’s Juliette.

The Lustful Turk, by J.B. Brookes was published in 1828 and “tells in a series of letters from Emily Barlow to Silvia Carey what befalls the former who, while en route to India, in captured by Moorish pirates and given to their captain, an “English renegade” as a gift to the Dey of Algiers.” There are some monks engaging in white slavery on the side. Sex happens etc.

Then Kearney goes on to say:

But the specific influence in The Lustful Turk is Byron. This is apparent from the first, when Emily is captured by that most powerful Byronic image, the ‘English renegade’ corsair. And later, in the sub-narratives that recount the lives of Honoria Grimaldi and Adianti, two of the other girls in the Dey’s harem, there are strong Byronic elements, particularly in Adianti’s story which in part concerns the excesses of the Turks during their occupation of Greece.

Apparently, The Lustful Turk is one of the most frequently reprinted erotic novels in English. Wikipedia on this book. It’s available on Amazon in print for a little over $10 or on Kindle for $0.99. Kindle it is. As I discovered just seconds ago, the first letter in this story is dated 1815 so I really have to read it.

And now, because Amazon lets you Search Inside The Book (O_O) I’ve discovered the reason for the price discrepancy between the print version and the Kindle version. The print version has pictures. And not crappy ones. So I have ordered the print version, too.

Should I report back next week or is that enough smut?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Erotica, smut, The Lustful Turk | 5 Replies