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I blame it all on Azteclady who made the suggestion in the discussion following Pam Rosenthal’s recent appearance here. She suggested LOLRegencies, after we talked about the implied silliness of the Elgin picture at right, a marvelous mixed bag of a portrait that begged for a caption. Or several.

So I indulged in a little time-wasting.

And here’s my idea. Send me your LOLRegency (as a low-res jpg) and I’ll post them for Thanksgiving Day. I have a couple of copies of the English edition (pink!) of The Rules of Gentility to give away to my favorites. Please let me know what form of your name to put with your artwork. Also, don’t make your art too big or too small–that said, I’d suggest you make them about the same size as the ones here, whatever that may be.

The email address is riskies@yahoo.com. Put LOLRegencies in the subject line, and send your efforts to me before midnight (EST) on Wednesday, November 26.

Update following Diane’s questions: if you don’t have photoshop, or some such (I used Appleworks), send me the pic and the caption(s). And I’m hoping to assemble these early on Thanksgiving morning, hence the deadline of late Wednesday, because I know so many of us will be dealing with a rock-hard frozen turkey and a hairdryer late at night…

Here’s a LOLRegencies insight into Jane Austen’s creative process:


and an insight into mine:

Looking forward to seeing much silliness and creativity….

Imagine my shock and horror when I realized we haven’t had a LOLRegencies contest in two years!

LOLRegencies? Yes, indeed. As your friendly Thursday blogger this means that I am destined to blog on Thanksgiving Day, and relating that to the Regency is a bit limited. Yes, they had turkeys in England. Yes, they were interested in Turkey. And yes, it’s around the time of George Eliot’s birthday usually, but I’ve talked about all of those. So in 2008 I held a contest and on the right is the picture that started it all, Lord Elgin on a collection rampage in Europe.

Our winner was Maggie, who produced this little beauty (one of a number of little beauties):

You can view Maggie’s other masterpieces and the entries here.

So how does it work?

  1. See icanhazcheeseburger.com for the LOLcats (and other animals) cultural phenomenon.
  2. Find a Regency print online (hopefully one without copyright) and caption it and send it to riskiesATyahoo.com by Monday, November 22 with LOL Regencies in the subject line.
  3. Use a low-res jpg and don’t make your entry too big–the Elgin one, for example, is 245px x 300px. If it’s too huge and I shrink it down the caption will shrink down also.
  4. Mention how you would like your name to appear with your entry.
  5. You can caption a picture using Paint as well as more complicated programs like photoshop.

And the prizes: I have a truckload of Georgette Heyer books to give away, so I’m offering two Heyer Grab Bags. Most of the books are new, a couple are slightly used.

Obligatory self promotion: I’m signing at Borders, Annapolis this Sunday, November 6, 2-4 pm. Come and say hello and buy books. My buddies Kathy Love, Christie Kelley, Stephanie Draven, and Robin Kaye will be signing too so there’s something for everyone!

I hope your Thanksgiving Day is going well (or, if you’re outside the US, your regular old Thursday). First, a picture that needs no caption at all.

You all excelled yourselves this year, with lots of entries, particularly from Karen who … well, Karen (and her husband) had time on her hands. She sent in a record breaking number of entries and I’ll post more another time. But she is my first winner with this little gem (how did I judge, may you ask? I drank tea. Any entry that cleaned my sinuses and endangered the keyboard was a finalist):

She also displayed remarkable ingenuity and imagination with these other entries:

The other winner is Kelly, of the Jane Austen Sequel Examiner, on a subject dear to my heart:
And many honorable mentions to Alison, our own Diane, Amy Katherine …

Louise, Teresa, and Maggie…

Kwana, Kathleen, and Tracey…

and Tracenga!

Thanks for playing, everyone! I hope your day is full of reasons to give thanks.

Winners, email your snailmail addresses to me at riskies AT yahoo.com.

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I’m still on deadline and I am so looking forward to getting this book finished! In December I’m going to play … many Jane Austen activities of course since her birthday is on December 16 (and yes, we’ll be celebrating here too!).

But I have been doing a few other things that I wanted to share with you. First, I’m reading My Lady Ludlow by Mrs. Gaskell, one of her shorter and neglected novels, part of which was used to flesh out the wonderful BBC Cranford. It’s set in the first few years of the nineteenth century and is a wonderful series of snapshots of country life (Mrs. Gaskell was born in 1810 so I like to imagine she’s gathering together everything she’s heard about the good old days). Some of it is surprising. First, here’s a description of a gown and a use of pocket holes (slits to accommodate the pockets, discrete items which hung inside from the petticoat) I’ve never heard before:

She had a fine Indian muslin shawl folded over her shoulders and across her chest and an apron of the same; a black silk mode gown made with short sleeves and ruffles, and with the tail thereof pulled through the pocket-hole, so as to shorten it to a useful length: beneath it she wore, as I could plainly see, a quilted lavender satin petticoat.

Or how about this? Have you ever heard of this particular fashion craze?

Nor would my lady sanction the fashion of the day, which, at the beginning of this century, made all the fine ladies take to making shoes. She said that such work was a consequence of the French Revolution, which had done much to annihilate all distinctions of rank and class, and hence it was that she saw young ladies of birth and breeding handling lasts, and awls, and dirty cobbling-wax, like shoe-makers’ daughters.

She’s very much old school, absolutely opposed to anything that will upset the social order–and this is a decade after the Reign of Terror, so she was probably fairly representative. Here’s a description of her hiring a servant, which gives a really fascinating insight into master/servant relationships:

… Then she would bid her say the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. Then she inquired if she could write. If she could, and she had liked all that had gone before, her face sank–it was a great disappointment for it was an all but inviolable rule with her never to engage a servant who could write. But I have know her ladyship break through it, although in both cases in which she did so she put the girl’s principles to a further and unusual test in asking her to repeat the Ten Commandments. One pert young woman–and yet I was sorry for her too, only she afterwards married a rich draper in Shrewsbury–who had got through her trials pretty tolerably, considering she could write, spoilt al, by saying glibly, at the end of the last Commandment, “An’t please your ladyship, I can cast accounts.”

“Go away, wench,” said my lady in a hurry, “you’re only fit for trade; you will not suit me for a servant.”

I’ve been enjoying the documentary series Circus on PBS–enjoying in the sense that I’ve seen snippets of them–really fascinating stuff. When I’m less busy I hope to catch them all.

And I’ve also started a singing group in my town, which is a wonderful, exciting project. Our lineup so far is five altos and one bass-baritone which is a bit limiting, but we have plans to go hunt down men (particularly tenors). This too was inspired by a British TV series, The Choir, in which a choirmaster, Gareth Malone, went into unlikely environments full of people who claimed they “can’t sing” and got them singing, enjoying it, and performing.

What are you doing for fun these days? Have you seen either of these TV shows? What’s your favorite Mrs. Gaskell?

Don’t forget to enter the LOLRegencies contest! Win valuable prizes!

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First, a happy Thanksgiving to all US readers, and the rest of you, remember it’s Friday tomorrow. (I think this is a duck. It doesn’t look very turkey-like, but I couldn’t resist sharing the joy.)

So, our winners. It was tough. Maggie, bless her heart, wasted a lot of time and so the numbers were on her side (you’ll see more of her contributions below), but this one clearly spoke to me as a winning entry. That look on his face… all is made clear:


and our other winner is Gemma, who adds this helpful explanation for her entry: In case you’re wondering what she’s wearing…. ladies presented at court had a dress code to follow which included the (then outdated) panniers/hoops of the Georgian era. Instead of wearing a Georgian-style dress, however, they just combined it with the high Regency waist, resulting in maximum wtf-age.

Maggie and Gemma, send your snailmail addresses to jmullany AT comcast.net (you can decipher that, right?) and I’ll send out your prizes!

And the rest–oh, I had fun with these. Keira, who already owns a copy of the Rules (thanks, Keira!) declined to be considered for a prize, but offered these two little beauties:

On the left: Edward V and Richard Duke of York Entering the Tower of London.

On the right: The Burning of the Savoy Palace: Eleanor Countess of March Confronts the Mob.

Little did the engraver suspect what our Keira would do to his work.

The lovely and talented Ms. Gaston, who claimed ignorance of LOL anything, showed a remarkable facility for the genre (obviously she was supposed to be writing):
Elena came through with this mind boggler of a piece of serious (?) art, hilariously representing Prinny’s uh, relationship with Brighton (I think). That poor artist… well, if His Highness represents the classical ideal of physical beauty no one will know who it is… A bit more tummy perhaps… a bit more …oops. And the expression of pained, exhausted indifference on the nymph’s face. Note he’s wearing his Order of the Garter too. (Don’t leave home without it.) Priceless.

Next, Anke (left) shows us a gentleman admiring a lady’s huge tracts o’ land, and Michelle sent the one on the right, with an apology for it maybe being too risque. Ha. She was blissfully unaware that Maggie was on the job.

For instance…

Maggie clearly had time on her hands and a wandering imagination. I was very tempted by all of these, particularly her poignant yet sensitive comment on the inadequacy of Napoleonic birth control, but ultimately it was the tiara one that made me snort tea out of my nose.

Congrats all, and thanks for playing!


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