My new best friend

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a wonderful holiday, whichever one you celebrate!

I got a truly amazing gift this year: a netbook! I had been thinking about buying one, so I could write at work or when I'm out and about, but I just couldn't justify the money. Then my uncle and a couple of my friends chipped in and bought it for me! I am so grateful I don't even know what to say.

My netbook, an EeePC S101 named Harry, is my new favorite thing in the entire world. He goes everywhere with me. He's small enough that I can comfortably check my e-mail or catch up on blogs or watch a movie while wrapped in blankets on the couch! (An important consideration this time of year.) Plus, I adore my laptop, but it doesn't have wireless. Harry does.

Last week I had to take my car to the mechanic for a few hours. Normally this would mean a few hours of window-shopping or something else equally unproductive, since my mechanic is pretty far from my house and my work both. But I took Harry with me, and lo and behold, someone had opened up a Jewish deli with free wireless just a few blocks away. I was able to have fried salami and eggs with a bagel, AND get some writing done!

(This Jewish deli is my OTHER new favorite thing in the entire world. Seattle doesn't really have a lot of New York-style delis, and this one is the real thing. I went back yesterday with a friend and got an overstuffed pastrami, swiss cheese, and coleslaw sandwich on rye, aka a "Rachel." It was HEAVEN. With each bite I was amazed anew that the sandwich was really as delicious as I had thought it was. Mmmmmmm. We also split an amazing piece of cheesecake.)

Anyway. Back on topic. Look at Harry! He's so pretty and sleek:





(The sticker is a drawing of a T-Rex saying "Ladies, please, one at a time!" It's from one of my favorite webcomics, Dinosaur Comics.)

I chose Harry because he was light, small, and relatively inexpensive, but an awesome side benefit is that there are rhinestones in his hinges, somewhat inexplicably (my photography skills are not the best, but you can kind of see it's there):



And here he is showing off my lovely website!



Which segues nicely into the other thing I wanted to mention, which is that my amazing web designer Jo recently updated my website with a whole section for In for a Penny!

It's all here and includes the first chapter of the book, deleted scenes, character interviews, and more! It also tells you where you can pre-order the book in the US, Canada, and the UK (and the Book Depository has free shipping to lots and lots of places, if you're somewhere else!). She really did an amazing job, I can't believe how good it looks. Check it out! (And keep your eyes peeled for a contest! Coming soon.)

I hope the new year brings all of you your heart's desire.

Casting call! (Part 1/2)

I had approximately twenty million things to get done this weekend, so what did I spent two hours doing? Casting my book. Yep. (I'm posting my results in a couple of installments since I am still stuck on a few characters, plus otherwise this would be a really long post.)

First: my hero. Nathaniel Arthur Delaval Ambrey, Viscount Nevinstoke (son and heir of the Earl of Bedlow). His friends call him "Nev," and he's a ne'er-do-well crossed with a geek (because I love geeks). He loves going to the theater and the opera, and he actually studied Latin at Cambridge in between wenching and gambling and all that.

He's a nice guy, he's just very young (23 years old) and has never really had to look out for anyone but himself. When his father dies, he finds the sudden responsibility for his family and estate a little overwhelming, but he wants very badly to live up to it. Penelope, the heroine, describes him like this:

There was, to be sure, nothing out of the common way about him. A perfectly ordinary-looking young man, Penelope insisted to herself. He was of middling height, his shoulders neither slim nor broad. His hands were not aristocratically slender--there was nothing to set them apart from the hands of any other gentleman of her acquaintance.

His hair was a little too long, and she thought its tousled appearance more the result of inattention than any attempt at fashion; it was neither dark nor fair, but merely brown--utterly nondescript save for a hint of cinnamon. His face too would have been unmemorable if it were not for a slight crookedness in his nose, suggesting it had been broken. His eyes were an ordinary blue, of an ordinary shape and size.

So why could she picture him so clearly, and why did the memory of his smile still make her feel--hot, and strange inside?

I think he looks like Adam Brody (only, of course, not Jewish and with a broken nose):



Now my heroine, Penelope Brown. Her parents were poor people who worked their way up to owning their own brewery and are now extremely rich. They sent her to a fancy finishing school that gave her a complex about being ladylike and sensible at all times, and she keeps trying to force herself into that mold even though it doesn't always fit.

When Nev first meets her, he has this to say: "She was really very pretty, with fine dark eyes, a straight little nose, and a girlish mouth, thin and expressive. Her complexion, framed by straight dark hair, was almost translucent. He suspected she would freckle in the sun." I think she looks a little like Molly Parker in this picture:



All I ever really say about Nev's little sister Louisa's appearance is that she's seventeen, has the same color hair as him, and that she is extremely fond of elaborate bonnets. Bonnet humor, never not funny. Louisa can be a brat, but I like her a lot. She has reasons to be angry; her family life isn't the greatest despite having an awesome older brother. I think this passage will give you a pretty good idea what she's like:

"Remember Louisa’s sixth birthday?" Nev asked.

"I’m afraid you’ll have to be more precise," Percy [Nev's best friend since childhood] said.

"She’d been telling everyone in sight for months that she wanted a pirate sword, and--"

"Oh, Lord, and your father bought her that enormous doll in a pink satin dress. I never saw a child look more forlorn in her life."

"He had no idea what was wrong."

"I can picture that doll perfectly to this day." Percy smiled reminiscently. "As I recall, I was betrothed to it for a time. Louisa used to commandeer its ship as it sailed to England to be my bride, and I had to duel her for it."

I think she looks like April Matson (the hair color is exactly right too):



Nev's mistress, Amy, is a talented actress (did I mention he loves the theater?). She's small and slender and has a tendency to freckle, like Penelope--Nev has a type. This description of her is from the scene where Nev has gotten engaged to Penelope and has to break up with her:

"He looked at her, but he didn't see her brown eyes or the mischievous tilt of her mouth or even the small, creamy breasts that curved into the clean white muslin of her frock. He didn't remember the year of laughter and sex and casual affection they had shared. He looked at Amy and all he could see was the thousands of pounds she had cost."

She has blond, curly hair, and I think she looks a little like Lindy Booth:

     

And finally, at the beginning of the story, before she gets engaged to Nev, Penelope is informally engaged to her best friend, Edward Macaulay. Mr. and Mrs. Brown don't approve for various reasons, including but not limited to: 1) Edward used to work at Brown Jug Breweries, but he left to work for a northern industrialist, which is much lower status than brewing, 2) he once got drunk and embarrassed himself at a Brown Jug Christmas party, 3) he's Catholic, and 4) they think that Penelope is not really in love with him--which she isn't. Nev describes him like this:

"Edward Macaulay had a broad, sensible, Scottish face, and broad, sensible, Scottish shoulders. His sandy hair was kept unfashionably short and brushed carefully back from his forehead, even though it was clear that had he allowed it to grow, it would have curled riotously in the best modern style without any prompting. He looked like a steady, dependable man, and Nev hated him on sight."

I imagine him as looking a bit like a younger version of Nicholas Lea--that same round face, bland coloring, and tendency to frown, but with some kind of indefinable charisma going on behind it.



And that's it for installment one! Next week we have Nev's best friends, Nev and Penelope's parents, and of course, the villain.

Jane Eyre, by Johnny Guns

This Kate Beaton comic on Burke and Hare cracked me up. As she says, "Here we meet Burke and Hare towards the end of their killing spree, a period which may be described as 'unbelievably sloppy' and also 'lazy.'" She also did another short one about the Brontë sisters. My Brontë sisters t-shirt by her (based on the comic I linked to a while back) came in the mail yesterday and it's awesome (although I should warn you, the shirt is more of a light green and the ink on the sisters is almost black, rather than the light/dark blue shown on the website)! Maybe if I have a good hair-day I'll post a picture.

In other news, I have a new Goodreads account here. I'll be posting book recommendations there, mostly for romance and historical research books, but probably also for whatever I'm reading that I like.

I'm going to see the Mountain Goats in concert tonight! They write amazing love songs. The first one I ever heard, way back in college, was "Going to Georgia":

The most remarkable thing about coming home to you
Is the feeling of being in motion again
It's the most extraordinary thing in the world

I have two big hands and a heart pumping blood
And a 1967 Colt .45 with a busted safety catch
The world shines
As I cross the Macon County line
Going to Georgia

The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway
Is that it's you
And that you're standing in the doorway
And you smile as you ease the gun from my hand
And I'm frozen with joy right where I stand
The world throws its light underneath your hair
Forty miles from Atlanta, this is nowhere
Going to Georgia

You can get the .mp3 from Amazon here.

Tell me an unusual love song that works for you.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

In for a Penny is listed on Amazon!!!! I had been checking it obsessively for a while to no avail and had finally given up, figuring it wouldn't be up until a couple of months before publication. Then last week my friend Paul Pollack (who, by the way, just published a lovely number theory textbook, "Not Always Buried Deep") IMed to say "Hey, your book's on Amazon!" There may have been chair-dancing.

Look! It's my book! Available for pre-order!

I have arrived.

My trip to the UK!

It's been almost a month since I got back from the UK, and it's taken me this long to organize and upload all my pictures. But my trip was AMAZING. We started out in Newcastle, where we spent most of our time on our friend's couch giggling and watching TV--"Black Books" is my new favorite thing!--but also managed to take in a castle and gardens, some art museums, and lovely architecture. One of my favorite things about the UK is how old stuff lives right alongside new stuff: in Newcastle I saw Tudor wattle-and-daub buildings jostling Georgian Neoclassical stone, Victorian townhouses, and modern glass-and-steel.

Then we took a train, bus, and ferry up to Orkney. I was horribly seasick on the ferry, which I didn't expect because I've never had a problem with boats before. You know those scenes when characters are crossing the Channel and someone's seasick and they're lying there shaking and moaning, "I'm dying, I know it"? I always thought those were an exaggeration but no, it is exactly like that.

Orkney is, hands down, the most beautiful place I've ever been, and its history is fascinating too. I was lucky enough to be staying with a friend who works for Historic Scotland so she had all kinds of great information and recommended a couple books as well. I'll be setting a book there sooner rather than later, I think. I was also pathetically amazed by the sight of cows and sheep grazing right at the edge of the sea. As an American, I'm just not used to the lack of beaches!

Then we drove down to Edinburgh and spent a few days there before flying home. My friend took us on the scenic route through the Highlands, and wow. I get what the big deal is now. (There were sheep on the highway, too, in case you were wondering.)

We also discovered that the most popular brand of oatmeal in Scotland has this picture on the box:



I think it's the shotput that makes it.

I've uploaded all my best pictures to flickr. You can see them here. To whet your appetite, here are some of my favorites (I apologize for the sides being cut off, I can't figure out how to make it not do that):

The Poison Gardens at Alnwick. Our guide was a truly macabre elderly woman in a sweater set, who kept making pronouncements like, "Two berries from this plant will kill a small child in ten hours. If you grind the berries into powder and sprinkle them on the ground, you will become invisible."



I told you Orkney was beautiful:



These are naturally occuring steps in the rocks by the sea. What a great place for a kissing scene!







This chapel was built out by Italian POWs during World War II so that they would have a place to hold Catholic services. They used two Nissen huts, some plaster, and leftover concrete from the causeways they were building. Here's the Wikipedia article--it's a fascinating story and the chapel is beautiful.





And now for something completely different! This stuff was everywhere in Edinburgh.

An embarrassment of riches

Last week I was very, very good and finished all my writing goals for the week! I even cleaned my bathroom (and boy, did it need it). So I promised myself I could buy as much as I wanted at the Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale this weekend. Here's what I ended up with:

Research:

1. The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain 1789-1837, by Ben Wilson.
2. Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1838, by Barbara Bush. (A different Barbara Bush.)
3. Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, by Juan Cole.
4. Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871 by Adam Zamoyski. I'm not sure how much of this will be Regency, nor does he appear to talk much about women. However, I've been wanting to read more about the Romantic movement for a long time and the book looks interesting, so we'll see.
5. London Life in the Eighteenth Century by M. Dorothy George. She seems to mean the long eighteenth century (which can start as early as the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and end as late as the Great Reform Bill of 1832, although in this case it means 1700-1815), which is nice for me. It mostly focuses on the details of working class life, with a whole section on "London Immigrants and Emigrants," one of my current research topics!
6. The Illustrated Companion to Nelson's Navy, by Nicholas Blake and Richard Lawrence.

Romance:

1. Flat-Out Sexy by Erin McCarthy. I remember this got a great review on Smart Bitches when it first came out.
2. Seduction of a Proper Gentleman, by Victoria Alexander.
3. The Boys Next Door, by Jennifer Echols. (YA. I loved her debut about the marching band, Major Crush.)
4. All-American Girl by Meg Cabot. Possibly her last YA series I haven't read any of.
5. Love Letters from a Duke by Elizabeth Boyle.
6. The Admiral's Bride by Suzanne Brockmann. Someone recced this to me YEARS ago.
7. Aaaaand, an extra copy of Lord of Scoundrels. Because you never know.

Cookbooks:

I don't cook at home as much as I used to now that I cook for a living, but I still love it and I always look in the cookbooks section. In past years I've found such gems as Barbara Cartland's The Romance of Food, The First Ladies Cook Book (featuring the favorite recipe of each First Lady of the US), and last year a book of excitingly-shaped cakes (dinosaurs, volcanos, &c.). This year I ended up with:

1. Romantic Italian Cookery by Mary Cadogan.
2. The Joy of Liberace: Retro Recipes from America's Kitschiest Kitchen. I never even knew Liberace was a cook! The book is full of amazing photos of him cooking, and also food with rhinestones on it.

Not a bad haul! If you're looking for me in the next month or so, I'll probably be diving into my books like Scrooge McDuck into his Money Bin.

Does your town have a library book sale? What's the best find you ever bought there?

The House of Commons opera hat

I've been doing some research on the British Parliament for my next book, and wow. I forget how much OLDER the UK is sometimes, and how much more time they've had to accumulate customs.

On one page of my book (The Great Palace by Christopher Jones) I see:

"The Mace, the symbol of Royal authority, must always be present when the House is sitting. Without it, the House is totally powerless."

(More on the Mace from Wikipedia. And here's a picture.)

On the next page:

"The Serjeant-at-Arms[...]is the only person in the Chamber allowed to wear a sword."

Two pages later:

"The House of Commons snuffbox. It is kept by the Principal Doorkeeper. Any Member may ask for a pinch of snuff before going into the Chamber."

How awesome is that? According to Wikipedia, "A floral-scented snuff called 'English Rose' is provided for members of the British House of Commons at public expense due to smoking in the House being banned since 1693. A famous silver communal snuff box kept at the entrance of the House was destroyed in an air raid during World War II with a replacement being subsequently presented to the House by Winston Churchill." (The new box was made from the timber recovered from the damaged Chamber.) Nicholas Fairbairn, an MP until 1995, was known during his tenure for being the only person to actually use the snuff.

What is even more awesome is that I cannot possibly feel the least bit superior, because it turns out the US Senate has ceremonial snuffboxes too!

But my very, very favorite is this:

"The House of Commons opera hat. The collapsible top hat which Members must wear if they want to raise a point of order during a division [their word for a vote]."

And there's a little picture of an old top hat sitting on a bench.

I was desperately sad to discover that this custom had been discontinued following a recommendation of the Select Committee on the Modernization of the House of Commons:

"64. At present, if a Member seeks to raise a point of order during a division, he or she must speak 'seated and covered'. In practice this means that an opera hat which is kept at each end of the Chamber has to be produced and passed to the Member concerned. This inevitably takes some time, during which the Member frequently seeks to use some other form of covering such as an Order Paper. This particular practice has almost certainly brought the House into greater ridicule than almost any other, particularly since the advent of television. We do not believe that it can be allowed to continue."

Another beautiful image was provided by Hansard's record of the discussion on the issue:

"We recommend a new procedure for raising points of order during a Division. At present, we have the opera hat, and, although some Members may feel that they look particularly fetching in it, it makes the House of Commons look ridiculous when someone wearing the hat is trying to raise a point of order from a seated position while everyone else is milling around and going to vote."

(Sidenote: If anyone writing historical romance with a political dimension doesn't already know about the online Hansard's, here it is! It is saving my life with things like dates of parliamentary recesses, when bills were proposed, &c.)

Can anyone find a picture of the opera hat? Preferably being worn. My Google-fu is failing me.

EEEE!

Very exciting news! My editor e-mailed me my cover yesterday!! Look:



(There's a larger version here if you'd like to see more detail on the painting, which is beautiful.)

Also note the incredibly flattering cover quote by Lauren Willig. I am the luckiest girl in the world.

I am so, so happy with this cover. I have heard a lot of horror stories about covers so I was a bit nervous about what mine would look like, but clearly the Dorchester art department is ACE. While in one small respect the cover doesn't fit the book (the book takes place in the middle of summer), I think it captures the mood of the book perfectly. I LOVE the way the warm sunset colors contrast with the snow. Plus red and gold has been my favorite color combination since I was about ten years old.

The cover also fits the book in another way that I think must be a coincidence (although I don't know for certain) but that means a lot to me personally. There's a scene early in the book where my impoverished hero is having dinner with Penelope and her nouveau riche parents, trying to win them over so they'll give their consent to the marriage.


It was as though he had the Midas touch. He went straight to her mother’s wall of sentimental engravings and old book illustrations in gilt frames, and pointed to a garishly-colored old engraving of Venice that her mother loved. "It's the Bridge of Sighs! Have you been to Venice, Miss Brown?"

"No," Penelope said. "I have never been out of England."

Mrs. Brown smiled. "Oh, those old pictures are all mine. Penny is much too elegant for such trifles! I hope very much to go to Venice with Mr. Brown someday."


Penelope, poor girl, is very concerned with appearing to have "elegant taste" at all times, since her parents sent her to boarding school with a lot of gently-bred girls and they all made fun of her for being a vulgar parvenue. I'm not entirely sure what type of wall-hangings she would prefer, but I'm guessing distantly-spaced original works in sober colors and plain frames, maybe contemporary landscapes or portraits. Gilt would NOT be involved. (Don't worry, she mostly gets over herself by the end of the book!)

I, on the other hand, think Mrs. Brown's wall sounds pretty, and it's an exaggerated version of something from my own life. On the wall by my parents' bed, there was a few feet between the window and the dresser where my mom had hung six or seven small romantic prints--a Hudson River School painting of the Amazon, a Bouguereau mother and child she got as a gift when I was born, a commemorative print my grandmother bought at the 1939 New York World's Fair, a sheet music cover my father bought her as a gift, and so on.

My mom died a few months after I wrote that scene (and long before I finished the book), but she was the audience I imagined while I was writing anyway. She read Pride and Prejudice aloud to me when I was nine, introduced me to Regency romances when I was twelve, and read my first manuscript when I was seventeen and told me it was good (in retrospect, it might have been more accurate to say it had potential).

The framed picture on the cover of In for a Penny would have fit right in on her wall, and that makes me very happy.

lab-tested and guaranteed NOT a citrine

While looking for the perfect ring for the hero of my next book to give the heroine, I fell utterly and completely in love with this one. I yearn for it. If only I had an extra $1,495 lying around!

And I'll be in Scotland afore ye!

Great news--plans are finalized and at the end of this month a friend and I are going to the UK for two weeks!

We'll be visiting friends in Newcastle and Orkney, and then spending a few days in Edinburgh.

I've been to the UK twice before. My mom took me to London, Bath, and Brighton as a college graduation present (so five years ago--yes, I'm young), and the year before that I studied abroad in Paris and spent some time in the summer travelling around Europe. In England, I visited the same three cities plus Canterbury and Oxford.

It was wonderful and I loved all those cities (especially Bath--sorry, Jane Austen, I know you weren't a fan!), but I'm excited to see a bit further north. Less and less of my book ideas seem to want to be set in London these days, so I want to collect other interesting settings. Newcastle is one of the northern industrial cities that come up so often when researching Regency politics and labor/class relations, and Orkney is...

Okay, my main association with Orkney is still Lot and Morgause from the Arthurian legends. But it's at the very northernmost part of Scotland, and my friend and I are taking a six-hour ferry ride there from Aberdeen. I LOVE ferries. It is going to be beautiful! (And there is a BAR on the ferry. I've never been on a ferry with a bar before.) Also, my friend lives in a cottage. She doesn't even have a street address, just "--- Cottage."

I promise I will post loads of pictures!

Does anyone have any tips to share for international travel (I haven't been out of the country in years), or suggestions for things we really ought to see? Regency-era stuff especially welcome...

"Maybe they didn't have black people back then."

It's International Blog Against Racism Week, and it FINALLY motivated me to do something I've been thinking about doing for a long time: research people of color in my era and setting of choice, Regency England.

I've written three manuscripts and I'm starting a fourth, and guess what? I haven't written a single black character, or Indian character, or Egyptian character, or even a Jewish character (and I'm Jewish myself). I haven't written a single character who isn't white and Christian. Not even a minor character or an extra in a crowd scene, unless you count having my heroine bank with Rothschild that one time.

Why is that? Well, the most obvious, easy answer is that the minority populations of England weren't as large during the early nineteenth century as they are today. Many of the big waves of immigration from different areas of the Empire hadn't happened yet. And that's true. But I think there are three factors that are far more important than that one:

1) My default is white. I wish this wasn't true, but it is. If I have to describe a random housemaid or the heroine's friend from finishing school or a sailor on the docks or a doctor or a land agent or a waitress or any of the huge cast of supporting characters that are inevitably created for any novel, it doesn't occur to me unless I consciously think about it that THEY COULD BE A PERSON OF COLOR.

Even Victorian Thackeray did better than that in his historical novels--just off the top of my head, there was an African page boy in History of Henry Esmond and a mixed-race student at Miss Pinkerton's in Vanity Fair. (Of course, both of those portrayals were racist, but that's hardly an excuse for my own whitewashing.) English society in 1815 was a lot more homogenous than it is now, but it was also a lot less homogenous than I've depicted it in my books.

Why do I say "supporting characters" up there? Because there's no way I know enough about nineteenth-century non-white-British cultures to write a story from the point of view of someone from one of those cultures. No way at all. Which leads me to:

2) I don't write characters of color because I don't have the knowledge base to write historical characters of color well, to give them the detail and the verisimilitude and the voice and life that every character needs.

Research for writing historical novels is an on-going process; no matter how many books I've read or how much I think I know about the Regency, every time I sit down to write I realize there's another gaping hole in my information. When is a cavalry officer allowed to wear his uniform off-duty? I asked myself a few days ago, and I had no idea. I know quite a lot about historical accounting and poaching and new farming methods in Norfolk thanks to In for a Penny, and right now I'm busy researching bluestockings and the internal workings of the Whig party for my next book, but when the time comes to write the next book I'll have to do a whole new set of research.

Since ALL of my information about the time period is acquired from books and fellow research geeks, and I don't have general knowledge based in life experience the way I do about the modern world, I know nothing about Regency communities of color because...

I've never researched Regency communities of color. Because I never really thought about it, and I can get away with never thinking about it.

3) Writing characters of color is scary, because if you do it wrong people might get upset. If you just don't write them, it is hard for people to get upset at you, because you blend in with all the other books that give the impression that the entire world is white.

I'm not happy writing books set in the All-White World anymore. So:

Here are some awesome Regency-set books written by white people that include major characters of color, as inspiration and example:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. The character in question is the wonderful Stephen Black, an extremely competent butler who, to his great dismay, becomes the favorite friend of a cruel and capricious fairy ruler. Stephen is awesomely realized, and oh yeah, he saves England in the end.

Naomi Novik's Temeraire series includes a variety of characters from different parts of the world (in particular, China and Africa).

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson. This one is actually set in the US in the period leading up to the Revolutionary War, but it's so great I included it anyway. It's about a little boy who gradually realizes that he is a slave and that his entire upbringing is an experiment by Enlightenment philosophers and scientists to determine whether Africans are inferior to Europeans. It's brilliant and inventive and the historical voice is amazing.

Here are the research books I just ordered:

Black London: Life Before Emancipation, by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. "Alongside migrants from all over Europe, Georgian London supported a community of more than 10,000 blacks. Theirs is the story that Ms. Gerzina, who teaches at Vassar College, tells with great clarity." - New York Times Book Review

Immigration, ethnicity, and racism in Britain: 1815-1945, by Panikos Panayi.

And here are the ones I put on my wishlist:

Black Experience and the Empire.
Black Writers in Britain: 1760-1890.
Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830. Yes, I'm a geek, I can't help it! Too bad textbooks like this are so expensive.
Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History.

If anyone can recommend good Regency romances with characters of color and/or good research reading on the subject, please do!

And here are some blog posts that brought home to me the importance of creating a multicultural world in my stories. They're about science fiction and fantasy because I read a lot of geeky blogs, but I think the principle is the same.

This one is about Uhura in the new Star Trek movie. I've always found it really, really difficult to describe or articulate how this invisibility feels, how it affects you and the way that you view and experience media. I remember someone posted a one page article or somesuch wherein all of the actors in STXI had just one little soundbyte type quotation about their character and their feelings about the original version. John Cho's was him noting that his reaction to Sulu was essentially: "OMG AN ASIAN GUY IS ON TV."

This one is a moving essay about the Earthsea trilogy and how it felt to the author to finally read a fantasy story with characters of color in it. Seriously, read this. I cried. But I remember Dad saying, how come you never see anybody like that in the stories you like? And I remember answering, maybe they didn't have black people back then. He said there's always been black people. I said but black people can't be wizards and space people and they can't fight evil, so they can't be in the story.

Musings on Race in Fantasy or: Why Ron Weasley isn't Black. This poster rambles a bit, but he makes some points that resonated with me, as a white author. No writer would dream of suggesting that a black person couldn't be beautiful, but our "generic" idea of beauty is pale and blonde, just like our "generic" idea of boyish charm is a freckly redhead and our "generic" idea of a wise man is a white guy with a long beard and a pointed nose.

I want to change, and I'm going to try. I know I'll probably make a lot of mistakes, but I think that's better than staying where I am, and hopefully, when I do mess up, I'll be able to apologize, think about it, and do better next time.

Dude watchin' with the Brontës

You all have to see today's hilarious comic by Kate Beaton! The three Brontë sisters are checking out guys together (. Emily and Charlotte are swooning over dark, mysterious jerks and Anne is disgusted! This makes me want to read Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which I have never gotten around to. Have any of you read it? Would you recommend it?

Plus ça change...

I've been doing research for my next book, and stumbled across something that reminded me of an important point about writing historical fiction.

A few years ago I came across the following quote by William Hazlitt (from a series of lectures he gave in 1818): "I am a great admirer of the female writers of the present day; they appear to me like so many modern Muses."

What a patronizing jerk! I thought. Those women aren't there to inspire YOU, they're artists who do their own creating!

Then, while reading the essay "Representing Culture: 'The Nine Living Muses'" by Elizabeth Eger in Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, which discusses this 1779 painting by Richard Samuel, I came across this passage:

"As Marina Warner has argued in her study of the allegory of female form, [the muses'] symbolic power is so universal that it seems that we are not meant to associate them with real women, let alone women artists. She is correct to make this point in a contemporary sense--we have for the large part lost a sense of the individual characters and functions of the muses, let alone the possibility that they might refer to real women. The muses form an allegory of ideas, in which the personification of abstract aesthetic categories is the primary device[...]Samuel, however, has painted his peers--living women who practiced the arts they represent[...]

Images of the muses or muse in the twentieth century have tended to be voiceless sources of male creativity rather than vivid practitioners of the arts. [...C]ertain male poets, such as Robert Graves, have been responsible for perpetrating the myth of the muse as an eternally feminine and passive figure of inspiration. The Romantic and modernist concentration on the individual act of literary creation has tended to focus on the poet's communication with the muse as an intimate and often highly sexualised relationship, obscuring the classical tradition of representing the muses as a group of independent, active, wilful and manipulative practitioners of the arts."

There are things I know are different about the Regency gentry: they talked differently and dressed differently, duels were a reasonable way to resolve an argument, a woman who had sex before marriage was "ruined," and not paying a gambling debt was worse than stiffing your grocer. I know those things because they're big things and I can't get away with not knowing them. (Although I still remember how shocked I was the first time I realized that "democracy" was a dirty word in mainstream society during the Regency! If I'd thought about it, I would have figured it out--but because positive associations with democracy are such a basic thing to me, I didn't think about it.)

But it's not just the big things that shift over time. Little things were different too, even things that seem "instinctive" or "obvious" to me. The muses represent X to me, so they must have represented X to a Regency person, because that is just what the muses are! But no, the human mind is a wonderful and fascinating thing, and many ways of thinking about things that seem self-evident are really just a product of culture.

Culture changes, even the little things. And if I want to write historical romance that really pulls the reader into another time and another world, if I want to really do justice to my time period, then I need to be as aware of that as possible.

(Of course, in searching for the quote for this post, I discovered that William Hazlitt goes on to say, "I could be in love with Mrs. Inchbald, romantic with Mrs. Radcliffe, and sarcastic with Madame D'Arblay"...so, I guess the women writers are just there to inspire him. He then mocks a series of women poets with such zingers as:

"Miss Baillie['s] tragedies and comedies, one of each to illustrate each of the passions, separately from the rest, are heresies in the dramatic art. She is a Unitarian in poetry. With her the passions are, like the French republic, one and indivisible: they are not so in nature, or in Shakespeare."

Oh, snap! I'm now picturing his lecture as a stand-up comedy routine that bombed horribly. Probably that's another anachronism, but hey, the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Clearly I should have trusted my instincts about Hazlitt.)

The letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly

I was looking through my notebooks and came across a great quote about writing from Nikos Kazantzakis's novel about St. Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis. (I can't vouch for the translation in the linked edition--I read a much earlier one--but as far as I can tell it's the only one in print.) The book is narrated by Francis's best friend and follower, Brother Leo, who says (and I apologize in advance for the association of blackness with the devil):

"Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons--and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them; they run off and how will you ever get control of them again? They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper--black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and ignore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind."

He's got it right on the nose, doesn't he?

Here is another bit from the book that I love:

"When an almond tree because covered with blossoms in the heart of winter, all the trees around it began to jeer. 'What vanity,' they screamed, 'what insolence! Just think, it believes it can bring spring in this way!' The flowers of the almond tree blushed for shame. 'Forgive me, my sisters,' said the tree. 'I swear I did not want to blossom, but suddenly I felt a warm springtime breeze in my heart.'"

"Is it true, the dreadful story about you and Currer Bell?"

I recently talked about Thackeray's dislike of Regency clothing. One of my favorite historical anecdotes about unfortunate coincidences and social awkwardness is about him and Charlotte Brontë.

I'm not actually sure how many times I've read Jane Eyre. The scene where Mr. Rochester talks about how there's a thread from his chest to hers, and if they were separated he might take to bleeding internally--I swoon every time. A few years ago, I got a copy that reprinted the preface to the second edition. I laughed and laughed. Here's the relevant bit in its entirety, because you don't really get the scale of the fullsome earnestness otherwise:

"There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital--a mien as dauntless and daring. Is the satirist of Vanity Fair admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time--they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.

Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day--as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterize his talent. They say he is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humor, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humor attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius, that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-cloud, does to the electric death-spark hid in his womb. Finally, I have alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him--if he will accept the tribute of a total stranger--I have dedicated this second edition of Jane Eyre.

Currer Bell.
Dec. 21st, 1847."

Now, Thackeray is a very Victorian, moral writer, and he does have social/political/moral points to make with his books. But he's also a snarky guy who doesn't seem to take himself too seriously. And Charlotte Brontë is a genius, and Thackeray loved Jane Eyre, but...her sense of humor isn't really her strong point, is it? I can't imagine Thackeray reading this incredibly sincere, dramatic, serious dedication without laughing yet also being sort of vicariously embarrassed. I don't think his intention was ever to save anyone from a fatal Ramoth-Gilead*, you know?

So I laughed, and I thought no more about it. But THEN I was reading a biography of Thackeray that my dad had lying around the house and discovered there was more to the story!**

Thackeray's wife, like the first Mrs. Rochester, was mentally ill. Which Charlotte Brontë would have had no way of knowing. But there was ALREADY a rumor going around that "Currer Bell" was Thackeray's children's governess, getting back at him for his unflattering portrayal of her as Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (which came out in serial form the same year). So when this dedication was printed a lot of people saw it as proof.

Yes! They were convinced that Jane was a Mary Sue for Charlotte Brontë and that Jane Eyre was about her and Thackeray's forbidden love!

This rumor was so popular it was still going around THIRTEEN YEARS LATER. In 1860 Thackeray was at a dinner party, and an American lady asked, "Is it true, the dreadful story about you and Currer Bell?"

Thackeray said, "Alas, madam, it is all too true. And the fruits of that unhallowed intimacy were six children. I slew them all with my own hand."

I love Thackeray a lot.

Now I'm wondering if Georgette Heyer was inspired by this misunderstanding when she wrote Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle.



*I looked up Ramoth-Gilead, in case any of you were wondering. Apparently the reference is to 1 Kings 22: all the prophets except Micaiah tell King Ahab he'll win if he fights to take back Ramoth-Gilead from the Syrians. Micaiah says, "I saw all Israel scattered upon the hills, as sheep that have not a shepherd: and the LORD said, These have no master: let them return every man to his house in peace." Ahab gets really mad and throws Micaiah in prison and goes into battle anyway. Of course he loses and gets killed.

...It doesn't say whether they let Micaiah out of prison after that.

**For this post, I confirmed the details in Love's Madness by Helen Small.

Five Titles In Search Of A Novel

I've been writing historical romance since I was 17, and since then I've never wanted to write any other kind of novel. I don't get plot bunnies for them, either.

What I do get are titles.

Seriously, I have a whole list of titles for never-to-be-written novels in such genres as:

The Great American Novel: Meet Me in Sumner J. Calish Square.
The Great American Expatriate Novel: The Bushes in Paris Have Thorns.
The Great Jewish-American Novel: Envious Kishke (and its sequel, Kaddish Cheese).
The Great American Novel with a Southern Setting: A Jar Big Enough to Hold the Sky.

I have no desire to actually WRITE any of these books. I don't know anything about their plots or characters, and anyway my talent is for writing an entirely different kind of book. But what I love about them is that you can tell from the title exactly what KIND of book they would be.

Obviously romance titles are often instantly recognizable too, and a lot of the time you can even guess subgenre: historical, paranormal, romantic suspense, comedy, &c. Which is something I love. I think it's amazing how genres and subgenres develop their own style and culture and conventions that a community of writers and readers can play with and follow and subvert and love and laugh at and share and make their own.

I love fake books and book titles within novels, too, so long as it's done with affection--for example, The Swordsman Whose Name Was Not Death in Ellen Kushner's Riverside novels.

I also love when real period titles get a mention. In In for a Penny, my hero reads Chronicles of an Illustrious House; or the Peer, the Lawyer, and the Hunchback. That's an actual book published by the Minerva Press in 1816, and it's much funnier than anything I could have come up with on my own!

Of course, it's not foolproof. For example, when I first saw the movie poster for "Immortal Beloved," I was CONVINCED it was going to be a vampire movie. You've got the intense 19th century guy in a red cravat, the beautiful women with chokers, and of course, the name--"Immortal Beloved." (Obviously, I knew nothing about the life of Beethoven.) I was completely stunned at being wrong. All the signs were there!

Does anyone else make up titles for books you'll never write? And if so, what are your titles?

And was there ever a time you were fooled by a title?

I have not the heart to disfigure my heroes and heroines by costumes so hideous

One of my favorite artists is Kate Beaton. She draws whimsical, energetic, hilarious webcomics--and a lot of them have historical subjects! One of my favorite Regency-themed ones is this one about Prinny.

Anyway, when I was visiting New York a few months ago and went to meet my editor Leah, I wore my Napoleon-eating-cookies t-shirt. Alissa, an assistant editor at Dorchester, asked me about it, so I sent along a couple of comics with my contract. (Okay I need to take a moment. Typing "my contract" is still very exciting for me.)

So Leah went to the Museum of Comics and Comic Arts festival and MET her! I am so, so jealous. Kate even drew her a cute sketch of Jane Austen being long-suffering about the hot men in her head and their unreasonable demands. Check it out here in Leah's blog!

One of the things I love about Kate Beaton is the way she draws historical clothing. She captures so much personality and period detail with a few simple lines. And this probably doesn't come as a surprise to anyone, but I love historical clothing. I'll admit to a soft spot for Georgian fashion (powder and patch!), but I really, really adore Regency-era stuff too.

Guess who hated Regency fashion? Thackeray. His novel Vanity Fair takes place over about ten or fifteen years (not sure exactly) surrounding the Battle of Waterloo. The recent movie with Reese Witherspoon had FABULOUS costumes--Jonathan Rhys Meyers' haircut in that movie is one of the most adorable things I've ever seen, and I'm not even a big fan of his. But when Thackeray drew his illustrations, he used contemporary (late 1840s) clothing. Here's his explanation:

"It was the author's intention, faithful to history, to depict all the characters of this tale in their proper costume, as they wore them at the commencement of this century. But when I remember the appearance of people in those days, and that an officer and lady were actually habited like this--



I have not the heart to disfigure my heroes and heroines by costumes so hideous; and have, on the contrary, engaged a model of rank dressed according to the present fashion."

I have always found this absolutely hilarious, because to me, 1840s clothes are SO much less attractive.

But remember how, until a couple of years ago, everyone was so hideously embarrassed by the eighties? It was impossible to look at eighties fashion and find it even remotely attractive. And now you see sort of modernized, sexy depictions of eighties fashion around sometimes, and the nineties are starting to seem a little embarrasing (oh dear God, the shoulderpads! the HAIR! Watch an episode of "Lois and Clark" sometime and you'll see what I mean).

When I was in elementary school (early 90s) there was NOTHING more horrifying than bellbottoms. I remember watching some kind of educational film made in the seventies when I was about ten, and every time a pair of bellbottoms came on screen the entire class would start laughing. And then flared jeans and peasant blouses came back in style, and "That 70s Show" took 70s fashion and made it look pretty adorable, and pictures of the 70s don't seem quite so appalling anymore. (They're still a LITTLE appalling.)

Is there a ten-to-twenty-year rotation on this stuff? Was Regency fashion Thackeray's equivalent of the eighties?

And how can the same outfit seem so great at the time, so awful a few years later, and kind of cute and nostalgic after a couple of decades?

Rhinestones are a girl's best friend

I recently had a publicity photo taken. I am very pleased with the result:



It's so very authorly, and the flash didn't go off when Christine (from Jersey Girl Photography, and she was very nice and reasonably priced, so if you are in Seattle and looking for a photographer, check her site out!) took it so it's very high-contrast. It looks kind of like it's on the faded cover of a '70s paperback, and I LOVE it even though I feel a little silly and like I'm about to introduce Masterpiece Theater or something. (That leather chair I'm sitting in, which lives in our living room, is actually really ratty, and when I sit in it, it tries to slide me off onto the floor.)

I love author photos. I love seeing how people choose to represent themselves publicly, and how an author's appearance meshes with their work. I think my favorite author photo ever is this one of Barbara Cartland:



Look how fabulous she is! Yeah, it's flashy, and overwhelmingly pink, but I sincerely love it, and I hope that someday I'm confident enough to have a photo that over-the-top taken of myself. Maybe in red brocade. Are any of those diamonds, do you think? I know she could have afforded it, but at the same time I am programmed to think "rhinestones" when I see something like that.

That photo appears on the back of a book by her I purchased at the Library Book Sale a couple of years ago, called The Romance of Food. It's one of the best book sale purchases I have ever made. The inside front cover describes it as "a collection of recipes which will revive even the most jaded lover and put a song in the heart of the most enraptured[...]Also, to show just how irresistible to the eye as well as to the palate are dishes such a Flower of the Heart, Summer Splendor and Fleur de Lis d'Amour, they and many others have been photographed at her own home, one of the most romantic settings in England."

On page 12, we learn:

"Some of the youngest-looking men on the screen and stage declare they owe their youthful appearance to a large consumption of liver and kidneys. Pope Pius V, famous for his aphrodisiacal dishes, originated a pie in which layers of sliced bull's testicles alternated with ground lamb kidneys."

Here are some of the best photos:





The caption for that one reads: "An exotic creature from the deep, the color of two red lips, which can invite, provoke, and surrender."

...


And this one is just for Susan Wilbanks, my critique partner and favorite Wellington fangirl:



"Beef Wellington: England's greatest General who defeated Napoleon and a plate worthy of his name in the Battle of Love."

Some other great captions:

"Noisette of Lamb with Baby Vegetables: What woman does not long to be carried like a lamb in the arms of the man she loves."

"Gypsy Magic and Imperial Splendor: The gypsies wandering romantically through the Countryside make watercress soup but the Russians with fire and passion prefer Borsch."

"Duck with Orange and Grand Marnier Sauce: A plate of Chinese magic in whose life the duck has always had a very special place."

"Normandy Pheasant: The leaves of Autumn fall from the trees but the beautiful exotic pheasant, who comes from China, delights the sportsman and surprisingly the sportswoman."

"Mocha Chocolate Cake, Black Currant Gateau and Meringues: An English tea; how many men have been beguiled and captivated by a soft voice offering them a meringue?"

Regency starter pack

My agent, Kevan Lyon, loves historical fiction, but the Regency isn't one of the periods she usually gravitates towards. After telling me about some books about the Elizabethan era that she'd been loving recently (Innocent Traitor and The Lady Elizabeth by Alison Weir), she asked if I had any recommendations for her. However, at that moment my brain was mostly jumping up and down screaming "I CAN HAZ AGENT! I CAN HAZ AGENT!" so I said I'd get back to her. Narrowing it down was tough, but here it is, my personal Regency starter pack:

1. Jane Austen. Obviously. Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility are the most famous and the best, but Northanger Abbey is probably my personal favorite. It's a hilarious parody and critique of Gothic novels, and more good-natured than some of her later books. Also, it contains a defense of popular novels which will never not make me chair-dance with delight. Here is an excerpt from the first page:

"No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy, would have supposed her born to be a heroine. [...]She had a thin awkward figure, a sallow skin without color, dark lank hair, and strong features;--so much for her person;--and not less unpropitious for heroism seemed her mind. She was fond of all boys' plays, and greatly preferred cricket not merely to dolls, but to the more heroic enjoyments of infancy, nursing a dormouse, feeding a canary-bird, or watering a rose-bush. Indeed she had no taste for a garden; and if she gathered flowers at all, it was chiefly for the pleasure of mischief--at least so it was conjectured from her always preferring those which she was forbidden to take."

2. Georgette Heyer, inventer of the Regency Romance genre. To be honest, I tend to prefer her Georgians--The Black Moth is one of my favorite romances of all time. But my other favorite of hers is the Regency-set The Grand Sophy (which seems to be currently out of print! The link goes to the new edition from Sourcebooks, which is coming out this summer, but if you don't want to wait there are used copies everywhere).

Unlike in a lot of Heyer's books, the hero and the heroine in this one are complete equals. In fact, Sophy frequently gets the best of Charles. She gets the best of EVERYBODY. She is awesome, funny and bossy and good-hearted and independent and brave and smart. Stuffy, honorable, macho Charles is quite lovable as well. An excerpt:

"You will scarcely drive yourself about the town in a curricle!" he said. "Nor do I consider a high-perch phaeton at all a suitable vehicle for a lady. They are not easy to drive. I should not care to see any of my sisters making the attempt."

"You must remember to tell them so," said Sophy affably. "Do they mind what you say to them? I never had a brother myself, so I can't know."

[...]"It might have been better for you if you had, cousin!" he said grimly.

"I don't think so," said Sophy, quite unruffled. "The little I have seen of brothers makes me glad that Sir Horace never burdened me with any."

"Thank you! I know how I may take that, I suppose!"

"Well, I imagine you might, for although you have a great many antiquated notions I don't think you stupid, precisely."

3. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. Not a romance, but an alternate history novel. Magic has long been gone from England, although legend says that one day the Raven King will return to bring it back. Then two men develop the ability to do real magic. Very long but completely absorbing, with a huge and endearing cast of characters (which includes wonderful female characters and a black character without ever softening or ignoring the social realities of the time). The ending of this book is one of the most satisfying conclusions to a novel I've ever read.

The historical voice in this book is AMAZING--and not just the Regency part, although that's when the action takes place. There are footnotes that include "excerpts from historical accounts," "folk songs," &c., and the tone and diction of each one is note-perfect. Here's the pseudo-folk ballad, "The Raven King":

"Not long, not long my father said
Not long shall you be ours
The Raven King knows all too well
Which are the fairest flowers

The priest was all too worldly
Though he prayed and rang his bell
The Raven King three candles lit
The priest said it was well

Her arms were all too feeble
Though she claimed to love me so
The Raven King stretched out his hand
She sighed and let me go

This land is all too shallow
It is painted on the sky
And trembles like the wind-shook rain
When the Raven King goes by

For always and for always
I pray remember me
Upon the moors, beneath the stars
With the King's wild company."

4. The Temeraire series, by Naomi Novik. The first one is the brilliantly-titled His Majesty's Dragon. They're generally marketed as "Patrick O'Brian with dragons," which is more or less accurate, and I personally didn't need to hear more to be completely sold. I mean, PATRICK O'BRIAN WITH DRAGONS. But the label doesn't quite capture the uniqueness and inventiveness of the books. Novik's historical voice fills me with envy and the books in the series build on each other in a really interesting way. And since they're alternate history, she's able to include some female fighters in a believable, appropriate-to-the-time way.

5. Lord of Scoundrels, by Loretta Chase. Chase is probably my favorite Regency romance author and this is one of my favorite romances ever. Her books are character-driven, well-researched, witty, sexy...I could go on but I'd probably embarrass myself. She also experiments with time and settings a little more than I'm used to--for example, Lord of Scoundrels isn't technically Regency since it takes place in the late 1820s, and a number of her other books take place in India, Central Europe, Italy, &c. An excerpt:

"Every man at the party had examined, at leisure and close quarters, that curving whiteness [the heroine's bare shoulders and cleavage].

While Dain, like the Prince of Darkness they all believed him to be, stood outside lurking in the shadows.

He did not feel very satanic at the moment. He felt, if the humiliating truth be told, like a starving beggar boy with his nose pressed to the windows of a pastry shop."

I love that passage, but I realize that perhaps it doesn't capture the book's brilliance or the hero's incredible appeal. However, on trying to skim through the book to find a better one, I...read about thirty pages before realizing what had happened. So.

6. Brighter than the Sun, by Julia Quinn. I love marriage of convenience stories, and this is one of my favorites. The hero and heroine are just both so charming, and the story is sweet and romantic and funny.

"Charles began to struggle against his bindings. 'If you harm a hair on her head...'

'Charles, I just told you I'm going to kill her," [SPOILER: villain's name redacted] said with a chuckle. 'I shouldn't worry too much about her hair, were I you.'"

7. Sorcery and Cecilia, by Patricia Wrede and Caroline Stevermer. An epistolary Regency with two awesome heroines and magic. I read this book when I was maybe ten or eleven, because I was obsessed with Wrede's children's books, the Enchanted Forest Chronicles. I had never yet read a Regency romance and didn't get a lot of the jokes, and I still soul-bonded with this book at first reading. Re-reading it later was like the icing on the cake of awesome. My first attempt at writing romance was actually writing in-character letters with a friend in imitation of this book. Plus, it has one of my favorite cravat jokes in it:

"The Marquis listened politely to my commonplaces about the weather, but I thought I detected some amusement in his reserve. At first I assumed the wind had done something to my hair. Then I realized Oliver was not merely standing, mute as a block, at my elbow, but was staring--positively gaping--at the Marquis.

The Marquis glanced from me to Oliver and said, almost too solicitously, 'Are you feeling quite well, Mr. Rushton?'

'Oh--quite well, thank you,' replied Oliver, coloring up. 'Only--I was admiring the way you tie your cravat. What do you call that fashion?'

The Marquis regarded Oliver with bland composure. 'I call it "the way I tie my cravat."'"

8. The Pink Carnation series, by Lauren Willig. The first one is The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. Chick lit/historical romance/Scarlet Pimpernel fanfiction, with the framing portions narrated by Eloise Kelly, a history Ph.D. candidate doing dissertation research in England; every book gets a new historical hero and heroine, with each couple somehow connected to the English spy, the Pink Carnation. I knew I would love these books from the very first chapter of the historical part of the book:

"When Amy was ten, the illustrated newsletters announced that the Scarlet Pimpernel had retired upon discovery of his identity--although the newsletters were rather unclear as to whether they or the French government had been the first to the get the scoop. SCARLET PIMPERNEL UNMASKED! proclaimed the Shropshire Intelligencer. Meanwhile The Cosmopolitan Lady's Book carried a ten-page spread on 'Fashions of the Scarlet Pimpernel: Costume Tips from the Man Who Brought You the French Aristocracy.'"

I also recently discovered Joanna Bourne and Elizabeth Hoyt--two relatively new authors who write well-researched, fresh, and satisfying historical romance with strong, unique heroines and amazing sexual tension. I'm excited to catch up on their books.

(I was going to include non-fiction, too, but then I realized that the non-fiction I read for my books tends to be too specialized for general recommendations--for example, one of my favorite research books for In for a Penny was the out-of-print title The Genesis of Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain, by Sidney Pollard. If you need to know about contemporary accounting practices, I recommend it highly!)

What are your can't-do-without Regency books? What would go in your starter pack?