Umberto Eco, Barbara Cartland, and Me: Saying I Love You in Historical Romance

Before I became a romance writer, I hadn't read romance for quite a number of years. And yet, on the strength of my memories and the buzz of my own more recent erotic writing, I somehow had the chutzpah to believe in the stories I was imagining, to feel they were mine, to trust my gut and stumble on in.

Beginner's mind, the Buddhists call it. I think I'll always write better when I feel a little like a stranger in a strange land. But I can still surprise myself (and scandalize some among my fellow writers) by how little I know about the genre and the market.

A recent case in point being when a friend remarked that surely most romance novels must be historicals.

Well, I thought, at least I know better than that.

No, I told my friend. In fact the biggest percentage of published romances are contemporaries (single-title and series, though I doubtless did a lousy job of explaining what a series romance was). Probably, I continued (confidently, wrong-headedly), historical romance doesn't account for more than 30 or 35% of genre's readership.

Hah! Check out the statistics, courtesy of Romance Writers of America's web page. Historical romance (which includes Regencies) accounts for only 16% of the market! (And note that if you count in at least half of the romantic suspense, women's fiction, and inspirationals published, there are probably three romance novels with present-day settings on the shelves for every historical.)

But present-day just doesn't say "romance" to me -- any more than it did for my only slightly more ignorant friend.

Why, I began to wonder. Why, for a certain kind of readerly sensibility, is romance a matter of somewhere that's not quite here, sometime that's not quite now?

A while back, in one of our hoyden discussions, I remember Mary saying that she read for escape. Perhaps, I thought, we're trying to create a hermetic, believable place of refuge (which, for a history hoyden, would be as free of anachronism as you can make it) for when life just gets too tough.

But upon reflection I want to put it differently. There's always anachronism. I don't just mean inevitable errors of detail (hey, my husband found one in War and Peace). The essential, inevitable anachronism -- a feature, not a bug, as the computer programmers say -- is the simple fact of history itself: it's impossible to write or to read about there and then except from the point of view of here and now.

We know we're living in the present because we don't know how it's going to turn out. Iran, Afghanistan, the Dow. Sarah Palin. Global warming. Who knows, who can know? In the present, the rules are always changing, the ground shifting under our feet. It's bracing, crazy-making, and not at all romantic to be alive and adult in this ticking time-bomb of a real world we call home.

Whereas in the worlds of historical fiction (and in other genres as well -- sometimes, I'd suggest, in the most dystopic sci fi) we know where we stand because we know where we're going. Reading our way through the early chapters of a genre novel, we're offered a simultaneous double pleasure: first of recapitulating the early thrill of learning language, gaining mastery over codes and the manners, clothes and tchotkes; and second, of return to and recognition of what we already know.

Critics of the romance genre like to diss it for the inevitability of its happy ending; in response, Julia Quinn rightly points out that in a mystery, no one expects Hercule Poiret not to solve it.

But there's more to it, I think, because in historical romance not only do we know who's going to marry whom, but what's going to happen to Brummell and Byron, Prinny and Napoleon. Equipped with past-and-present parallax vision, the historical romance reader can even see that the heroines (or at least the heroines' daughters' daughters) are eventually going to achieve fuller humanity; we can enjoy all that pretty, protected, muslin-and-corsets second-class citizenship with good conscience, secure in the knowledge that that the witty, sparkly, rebellious moments are actually going to add up to something.

The historical romance doesn't just plop a romance plot into history. It romanticizes history itself, by giving it the beginning, middle, and end we can never get from the rough strife of living our lives.

Some people damn it as costume fiction. Indeed, having gotten my fiction-writing start in fetishistic BDSM erotica, for years I did think was mostly about the props and costumes. And according to one of the most stimulating critical studies I've read in a while -- Historical Romance: Heterosexuality and Performativity, by Lisa Fletcher -- I was partly right; and moreover, the elements of masquerade, role confusion, and crossdressing that I've always been so fond of are pretty important and central to the genre as well.

I should confess that I read this book because I'd heard that Fletcher uses my Almost a Gentleman as one of the examples in her chapter on cross-dressing in popular romance fiction. But what I learned goes far beyond a vindication of my obsessions and intuitions. I'll be mulling over it well into the future, but in right now I've only got space for one zinger of an idea that I want to share. With great gratitude to Lisa Fletcher, for citing this observation by Umberto Eco, the critic and author of The Name of the Rose, who suggests that we think of:

...a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows he cannot say to her, "I love you madly," because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still, there is a solution. He can say, "As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly." At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly that it is no longer possible to speak innocently, he will nevertheless have said what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her, but he loves her in an age of lost innocence.

Oh yes. That's how it for me anyway. I may be a stranger in a strange land, but I'm no false innocent. And I suspect that (in our present Silver Age of the Smart, Romance-reading Bitch) few of us are. That we're all learning to say I love you in the present tense by knowing that we've been this way before, by the great circle route of the recreated romantic past.

Definitely more to come, especially on those gnarly notions of heterosexuality and performativity.

But now I'd love to hear from anybody with whom this strikes a responsive chord. Or any innocents out there, false or perhaps not.

Heartfelt thanks to romance scholar Dr. Eric Selinger, of Depaul University and the International Association for the Study of Popular Romance (note to romance geeks: join IASPR!) for turning me on to this terrific critical study.

"Let Them Eat Cake" ... Marie Antoinette maligned

I've been doing a fair bit of research on Marie Antoinette lately, a woman who, despite her foibles, friviolities, and frailties, was made the scapegoat of an era, always despised as an outsider (which was in fact the point of most arranged royal marriages), and derided by even her husband's eldest maiden aunt as L'Autrichienne (a mean-spirited pun on "the Austrian" as well as the French word for "bitch," chienne.)

Sure, she was a horrific spendthrift, but so was everyone else at court; and as Queen of France, not only was she expected to set the tone in fashion, but she was supposed to support the kingdom's various factories. "Buy local" was her mandate and so her extravagant purchases of Lyons silks, Alençon lace, and Sèvres porcelain--all of which were emulated by the nobility--was a way of keeping her subjects employed.

Scorn and derision were heaped upon Marie Antoinette's elaborately coiffed head even during her lifetime. It was often repeated that when bread was so scare that there was rioting in the streets, she callously remarked, "If they have no bread, then let them eat cake."

It made the broadsheets, and even the history books, but she never said it. In fact, the origin of the phrase remains in doubt. Although historian Antonia Fraser cites no attribution for her conjecture, she believes the phrase was uttered by another French queen, and another foreigner to boot, the Spanish born wife of Louis XIV, Marie-Thérèse, who was said to have remarked that if the peasants had no bread then let them eat the crust (croûte) of the paté. She she never used the word "cake" either (which is gâteau in French).

In book six of his autobiography, The Confessions, the noted philosopher, novelist, and radical, Jean-Jacques Rousseau referred to the infamous quote, also without attribution. He wrote:

"Enfin je me rappelai le pis-aller d’une grande princesse à qui l’on disait que les paysans n’avaient pas de pain, et qui répondit : Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. J’achetai de la brioche. ", which translates to: "Finally I recalled the worst-recourse of a great princess to whom one said that the peasants had no bread, and who responded: "Let them eat brioche"... [a savory roll often eaten at breakfast; the recipe is full of eggs and butter, and very rich-tasting.]

Although The Confessions was not published until 1782, the book were completed in 1769 when Marie Antoinette was merely a prepubescent Archduchess of Austria. She did not arrive in France until the spring of 1770 when she was all of fourteen years old, a roses-and-cream child whose only desire was to please her adopted family and kingdom. So Rousseau could not possibly have been fingering Marie Antoinette when he referred to "une grande princess."

Marie Antoinette in 1769 when she was 13 or 14 years old; the same year Rousseau finished his Confessions

Marie Antoinette was such a soft touch that she alone of the French royal family refused to trash the peasants' cornfields by riding through them during the hunt. True, in her nearly twenty years of marriage (before her incarceration in the Tuileries after the mob stormed Versailles in July, 1789), she should have ventured out among her people beyond the outskirts of Versailles and the environs of Paris. But she was more aware of the lives of the laborers than one gives her credit for; and, to quote a fairly recent US president, she did feel their pain.

So, even though we're a bunch of history geeks and sticklers on this blog, how do you feel about playing fast and loose with such a well known remark? Let's assume that Marie Antoinette never said "let them eat cake" (or any permutation of that phrase). Would you attribute the quote to her anyway, for the sake of fiction?

And ... have you ever let the facts not get in the way of a good story, so to speak? When?

Castles Defined

Quickly, without putting on your scholar's cap, what does the word CASTLE call to mind? My first image is the Disney Castle but then I was raised on Walt Disney every Sunday night. When I asked my niece what words she would use to describe the way a castle made her feel she said: safe (and beautiful but that is a another subject entirely)

Not bad for a ten-year-old. Sir Charles Oman in his book "Castles" defines it as “a fortified dwelling intended for purposes of residence and defense.” It takes four pages of fascinating reading to prove his phrase.

Timber and Earth castles were the simplest castles to bear the name. They were not much more than a raised earth mound and a small house-like structure surrounded by a wooden palisade. Usually made of oak, they could withstand attacks but were built for security and not to impress. I'd love to write a story where the bride is told she will live in a castle and arrives to find "timber and earth" and not one iota of elegance.

Scholars used to think that timber and earth castles preceded stone castles Now it is thought that both were built at the same time, the determining factor being how quickly the castle was needed and what materials were available (source: "Castles of Britain and Ireland" by Plantagenet Fry).

Dating from 1066 to1200 timber and earth castles or their stone counterparts were built for the purpose of controlling newly claimed property and the people who lived on it. There were two types of castles according to Oman: royal and baronial.

The king had a series of castles built to protect his interest. To intimidate the populace, to defend from an external enemy and those built to protect critical rivers, roads and passes. Oman estimates that before 1100 William had some thirty royal castles.

Baronial castles were spots chosen by the new Norman landholders as the best place to site their building, both for defense and convenience of travel. Not being the most trusting king in the world, William rarely bestowed a whole region on a single man. If a knight had more than one castle they were nowhere near each other, each castle protecting a separate holding. The exceptions were in the great frontier areas such as Shrewsbury.

Uusally, castles were built near population centers. There are hardly any castles dating from the Norman conquest in “the long stretch in the wooded weald of Kent and Sussex between the line of castles north of it and those near the sea.” (Osman) The same is true of the moors, fens and bare downs.

One of those classed as ‘near the sea’ by Osman is one of my all time favorite castles pictured at the right – Bodiam Castle. It was built in one complete operation in the 1380’s significantly after the Norman Conquest. It is ironic that the license permitted the knight to build the castle because of the real threat of French invasion. In his book, Fry gives a wonderful description of the interior of Bodiam, clearly built for comfort and defense.

Bodiam’s defenses were not “severely” tested until it was threatened with bombardment during the Civil War – the owner promptly surrendered.


In my book LOVER'S KISS, the art department inadvertently designed the prefect castle for the Pennistan family. When I saw the cover I knew that this was the place the Pennistans had called home for hundreds of years. The rounded part is the original building, built for defense, complete with a partial moat. After the Civil War the square section was added for comfort.

One last thought: palaces were built for lavish comfort and not for defense. The words castle and palace are not interchangeable even though some castles grew into very comfortable houses.

What comes to mind when you think of a castle? Do you have a favorite?

(This is an updated version of a subject originally discussed on January 13, 2007)

Infidelity - the dark side of romance?

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It’s at the heart of the conflict in Casablanca, Tristan & Isolde, The English Patient, Anna Karenina, Notorious, Brief Encounter, The Painted Veil, and countless classic love stories. And yet for many readers, it’s a deal-breaker, particularly when it comes to genre romance.

As a reader and a writer, I don’t dislike infidelity or adultery plots per say. Infidelity is an uncomfortable subject but uncomfortable subjects can make for good drama. It can definitely be a challenge to give a story a happy ending after someone’s been unfaithful. Of all of the stories I mentioned at the start of the post, only Notorious has a conventional happily-ever-after ending. The others have unhappy or bittersweet endings. If the marriage survives the infidelity, you need to believe that the couple can get past it, that it won’t happen again, that the betrayed partner won’t constantly blame the unfaithful partner (which is pretty mucht he conversation Steve and Miranda have with their marriage counselor in the recent Sex & the City movie). If the unfaithful lovers end up together, one can find oneself sympathizing with the betrayed spouse. Notorious pulls it off by making the spouse a villain, albeit a complex one who genuinely loves his wife. Although when I posted about this topic on my own website recently, Lesley pointed out that "In classic fiction, it seems that adultery by a woman is punishable by death (Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary), but from the C20th this is less often the case (Lady Chatterley for instance)." but from the C20th this is less often the case (Lady Chatterley for instance)."

Of course the terms of the marriage and the expectations go into it affect the level of betrayal. In my historical romance, Rightfully His, there’s a subplot between the heroine’s sister and her husband who have a society marriage in which both have lovers and they get along quite amiably. However, in the course of the book, they realize that they love each other and the terms of their marriage change.

Lesley brought up the Poldark novels (the tv series based on them), in the course of which both Ross and Demelza are unfaithful and yet ultimately they get past the betrayals. "In the Poldark novels, the repercussions of both Ross and Demelza’s infidelities echo for many years, continuing to put strain on what is otherwise a strong and loving marriage. With a long series covering many years, there is plenty of scope for a writer to work through the issues raised." Stephanie added, "While I don’t think two wrongs make a right, I couldn’t help feeling a glimmer of satisfaction that Ross finally got to experience a bit of what his wife had endured for years, during his obsession with Elizabeth." I have to say, I felt much the same.

Both the hero and heroine in Pam's wonderful The Slightest Provocation have been unfaithful when the story begins with them married but estranged. It gives them a lot of past baggage to work through but it also means they start with the scales, in a sense, balanced.

Lesley also mentioned Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolò series: "I know many readers couldn’t forgive Gelis in the House of Niccolo books, and felt that the reasons given for her behaviour weren’t sufficient to justify her actions." Some of the most spirited Dunnett discussions I've been involved in concern readers differing views of Gelis. Personally, I had issues with the House of Niccolò in the end (while at the start, I liked it better than the Lymond Chronicles) but not because of Gelis. I could understand why she did what she did, and I could believe she and Nicholas got past it. (Though ultimately, when everyone’s motivations were revealed, it all got a bit murky.)

I write about betrayal a lot, so when I write about infidelity, I like to explore how it compares and contrasts to other types of betrayal. In Secrets of a Lady Mélanie has undeniably betrayed Charles in a number of ways, but I deliberately left it ambiguous as to whether or not she committed adultery. I actually was explicit about it in an earlier draft of the book, then decided I wasn’t sure myself so I left it open to question. I figured out the answer for myself a bit later, and at some point, when appropriate, I’ll work it into a subsequent book.

They do confront the issue of infidelity and their different expectations going into marriage, in a scene in the as yet unpublished The Mask of Night:

You didn’t intend to be faithful when you married me.”

She regarded him with that scouring honesty with which she confronted uncomfortable questions. “No, I didn’t. But then I’d never hold my own behavior up as a model of anything.” She smoothed a crease from her skirt. “Did you? Intend to be faithful?”

“Yes, as it happens. But it was hardly as though I had a very active career to abandon.”

“And you take your promises seriously.” In the warm wash of candlelight, Mélanie’s gaze had the bruised look he remembered from last night. “Fidelity hasn’t been a word in my vocabulary for a long time. It might have been once. When I was a girl playing Juliet in my father’s theatre company. Before—”

“Everything else.” Before she’d been raped by a gang of British soldiers, seen her father and sister killed, been left penniless and homeless.

“Being raped was the least of it,” she said, in the low, rough voice he’d learned to recognize from moments when she dredged up long-buried truths. “I could have got past that, I think. It was losing everyone I cared about, fighting for survival. I had to claw my way back to a sense of purpose. When I did, so much I’d used to value didn’t make sense anymore.”

“There’s more than one kind of fidelity, Mel. You’ve been remarkably faithful to a number of things.”

Her gaze fastened on his face. “Charles, you know that I—“

He looked into the scarred, beautiful eyes from which he’d never been able to hide things. He found he didn’t want a declaration based on duty or guilt. “I know you,” he said.

How do you feel about infidelity in books? Is it a deal-breaker? If not, what you think makes it work in some stories? Does it make a difference whether it’s the hero or the heroine who is unfaithful? What the terms of the marriage are? Whether it’s a story about a couple overcoming one or both partners’ infidelity or the story of a pair of unfaithful lovers? Oh, and if you've read Secrets, do you think Mélanie was unfaithful to Charles after they married? Why or why not?

Petticoats

I’m going to do a simple post today on the topic of petticoats. In my books (set in the 18th century), petticoats is the generic term for all the layers of a woman’s skirts, the outer as well as the under. By the Regency, a petticoat has come to mean a specific undergarment; a layer that goes over the stays but under the gown. It serves a couple different purposes: It adds to the opacity of the ensemble (many gowns being basically see-though) and it can add warmth (esp if it’s made out of something like a lightweight knit wool).

The examples I’ve seen tend to either close in the back with Dorset thread buttons or with drawstring ties (one for the neckline and one for the waist), or they button under the arm (which was also common for habits and walking dresses which were comprised of a skirt [with a small bodice to hold it up] and a spencer/jacket).

The first image is a petticoat c. 1800 with whitework around the hem.

The second is another c. 1820. You can see that the waist has moved down and the bottom has multiple layers of cording to stiffen it and help hold out the skirts.

Anyone have any questions about petticoats or any other specific bit of underwear?

A mansion in McCloud

I just returned from a delicious week spent in McCloud, California. This tiny village sits just south of Mt. Shasta, which you can see from every street in town. McCloud is my favorite place to rest and recoup, partly because my brother and his wife live there, partly because I have no agenda or to-do list when I visit, and partly because their house has a huge, old-fashioned sunny/shady front porch.

This house was built in 1904! McCloud is an old lumber-mill town in Siskiyou County, 14 miles east of Highway 5. Between 1904 and 1908, the mill owners built all the houses in town for the lumbermen and their families, and the structures are still solid as a just-skinned redwood tree. Most are two-story, with big rambling kitchens, many-paned windows, big front porches, fenced gardens, steep roofs (for the snow), and wood shingles.

When my brother and his wife first looked at the house, it was divided into two separate upstairs and downstairs apartments (nowdays you’d call it a duplex). When they bought it in 2004 it was a real mess. They converted it into a (very large) single-family house, stripped the hardwood floor, added 3 elegant bathrooms (!), modernized the kitchen, scraped off the wallpaper and painted all the walls (including the beautiful old crown molding). Then they furnished the entire place with antiques scrounged from estate sales in nearby Dunsmuir and Shasta City.

If you love big, old houses, you would love this place: four bedrooms with wrought iron double-bedstead frames and handmade heirloom quilts; 4 bathrooms, 3 with old-fashioned claw-foot tubs; oriental rugs bought at estate sales on the downstairs living room floor and on the upstairs living room floor; and a wall-to-wall windowed sun-porch upstairs that runs the width of the house.

And, of course, my favorite feature---the sublimely relaxing front porch, on which I hang out and work on my novel in progress.
And read.
And nibble cheese and wine.
And talk.
And write...
And wish I could spend year-round in McCloud.

I adore old houses. Do you?

All About Alais

People celebrate Father’s Day in their own special ways. This year, my family popped A Lion in Winter into the DVD player. As heartwarming family dramas go, it is right up there with King Lear. No one’s eyes get put out, but there’s plenty of paternal howling on the heath, filial betrayal, and general familial disillusionment. There is not a single son of Henry II who doesn’t betray him. Everyone gets disowned at least once. Stuff to warm the cockles of one’s heart. I’m just waiting it for the Plantagenet Guide to Parenting. One could shelve it right next to the Titus Andronicus Cookbook.

What I wanted to know was, what happened to Alais? For those who don’t know the story, A Lion in Winter is a (heavily fictionalized) account of the latter days of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, as their sons play parent off against parent in an attempt to snag the crown—while Eleanor and Henry play son off against son in an attempt to score points off each other in a long-standing love match turned grudge match. In the midst of it all is the sister of the French king, long ago betrothed to Richard, then Count of Poitou, sent as a child of nine to be raised in the English court, now mistress to Henry II, passed around as a pawn from prince to prince.

In the movie, Alais is the last joy of an aging king, the May in a May and December romance. Was the poor Princess Alais Henry II’s mistress? Contemporary chroniclers certainly seemed to think so. Giraldus Cambrensis claimed that Henry had plans to annul his marriage to Eleanor, disinherit his sons, marry Alais, and breed a new line of heirs to his empire. Whether those were his ultimate plans or not, the rumor that he had taken her to his bed echoed through two kingdoms. Alais was alternately promised to both Richard and John and in the end wed to neither. Not all that unlike the movie, minus the little matter of love.

So what happened to Alais after those final credits rolled? Throughout the reign of Richard, Alais was held in close confinement, first in Rouen, then in Caen. Brought to the English court at nine, she was thirty-three by the time she was finally released, traded back to her brother Philip as one bargaining chip among many in a treaty during the incessant wars between England and France. Although she was, by the standards of the day, not only used goods but well past her marital sell-by date, Philip found another matrimonial alliance for her: he married Alais off to Guillaume de Ponthieu, whose lands provided a buffer on the French frontier against those held by Richard on one side and the Count of Flanders on the other. She bore Guillaume three children, dying in childbed with the last at the age of forty.

Unlike the woman in whose shadow she spent her youth, the redoubtable Eleanor of Aquitaine, Alais seems to have had little say in her own destiny. But one can't help wondering what it must have been like to have been at the front-lines of the Plantagenet squabbles, with all those larger-than-life characters charging about.

Someone really ought to write a book about her…. Are there any overlooked historical characters who you think deserve their own novel time?