Wenlock

2011-10-05T11:13:00.000+01:00

Heyeroines in need of a slap

27. Léonie de Saint-Vire (These Old Shades)

The Long Eighteenth Century, that gilded period during which the world as we know it was transformed irrevocably. Wordsworth wrote, of a day in 1789:

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!--Oh! times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

And some few decades earlier, when our tale unfolds, Mademoiselle Léonie de Saint-Vire was indeed young, and thus well-placed to bask in the changing of the order of the Universe.

The very year in which she came to Paris, Rocque Joaquin de Alcubierre uncovered the ruins of Pompeii, and our ideas of Classical Rome were never the same again. And how did this momentous discovery affect young Léonie? She attempts to murder her sister-in-law "with the big carving-knife."

Seven years later the great Scottish physician and scientist, Joseph Black, discovers both carbon dioxide and magnesium, while Leonhard Euler publishes his magisterial Institutiones calculi differentialis, placing Leibniz and Newton's work on calculus onto a sound footing for the first time. Léonie's reaction? She runs away from home and says "bah". Frequently.

Of course a tavern in the Rue Sainte-Marie is hardly the best place from which to observe the world, but from the day she enters the Duke of Avon's household she has access to a fine library and the newspapers. Surely now she will take advantage of those times in which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways of custom, law, and statute, are taking at once the attraction of a country in romance? Within a week of her arrival at that fine hôtel in the Rue Saint-Honoré, Lisbon is destroyed in an earthquake that kills 60,000 to 90,000 people. Yet Léonie pays no real heed, pausing merely to threaten her fellow servants with a dagger. The loss of the second Eddystone Lighthouse, an event that set all England a-buzz also passes without comment from Léonie, other than that the King looks in real life as he does on his coinage.

Perhaps the Duke's decision to transfer Mademoiselle de Saint-Vire to Avon Court was triggered as much by his growing realisation that she was failing to observe what was going on around her as it was by any consideration of babies swapped at birth or girls dressing as boys or longstanding enmities between noble families. Alas, despite her presence in London for the signing of the Treaty of Westminster, Léonie prefers to opine dismissively on the Duke's family and to say "bah" some more.

And then, when the French invade Minorca, triggering the Seven Years War, the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Last of the Mohicans, Léonie returns to Paris for her triumph. Ill-timed to say the least.

Is a slap sufficient when dealing with what starts to look like willful High Treason?

2011-10-02T17:58:00.000+01:00

Heyeroines in need of a slap

26. Harriet Presteigne (The Foundling)

Poor Harry. It is a poor enough show for a Heyeroine that she does notappear until Chapter Four of her novel, but for Lady Harriet Presteigne theindignity is heightened by the detailed anatomising of her character by LordLionel some two chapters earlier. Any hope she may have cherished that shemight bring an air of mystery into TheFoundling is put to flight by our knowledge that she is a Very WellBrought-Up Girl, albeit one with a Want Of Spirits in her. But above all elseshe stands condemned by his lordship as Amiable. Is it any wonder that, afterher brief appearance in Chapter Four, she disappears off to Bath, playing no furtherpart in our story until Chapter Twenty, by when she has been additionally characterisedin absentia as a Squab Little FigureOf A Girl, and indeed Nothing Out Of The Ordinary, by the delightful LadyBoscastle?

None of this would be a problem if Lady Harriet could lay claim, like Miss Lanyon,Miss Stanton-Lacy, Miss Grantham or dear, sweet Miss Wantage, to being thetitle character of her tale. But, while Harriet is lying low with the DowagerCountess of Ampleforth, this role is snatched by the bewitching Belinda. Indeedit would not surprise me to learn that at least one writer of my acquaintance hadput forward the view that Belinda should be seen as the true Heyeroine here. Wehave, of course, trodden this ground before with both Miss Wychwood and Miss Theale, in competition with Miss Carleton and Miss Summercourt respectively. Needless tosay, Wenlock’s position remains the definitive one. Lady Harriet is our Heyeroine.But how can a Heyeroine, indeed a Heyeroine who has, we are told (albeit toldby a man whose only positive virtue is the possession of whiskers during theRegency), a Superior Understanding, For A Female, have made such a poor fist ofthe role she was written to fulfil?

The answer, I suggest, can be summed up in a word: cant. The briefest perusalof The Foundling will demonstratethat the key to success in its pages is not breeding, still less money, but amastery of low speech. And when it comes to speaking cant, it appears that LadyHarriet simply can’t.

The Duke of Sale’s cousins merely talk in cant, Matthew accusing his brotherof Bamming and his father of Nabbling Thirsk with Gideon merely referring toMatthew as a Rasher-Of-Wind. His servants meanwhile go as far as thinking in cant, A-Worriting,for instance, that the Duke is being treated to enough Cross-And-Jostle Work todrive him to Bedlam. It is fair to say that these characters do well enough forthemselves by the end of the book.

But the real successes of the story are those whose mastery of cant iscomplete. Tom Mamble turns up in Chapter Nine without a Meg, but with a mouth full of Ruff Peck and by ChapterTwenty-Six is out shooting across Cheyney bagging every stray woodcock,pheasant, partridge, badger or Cotswold Lion he can point a Purdey at. This achievementwould scarcely be conceivable had not Tom had a command of cant that would makea Kettering Ironmaster blush.

Beyond even Tom’s grasp of the tongue is Samuel Mimms, or as he prefers tobe called, Swithin Liversedge. Oh, he can negotiate a pretty turn of phrasewhen it is needful, but when it comes to managing a Rare Bleached Mort, with orwithout any sense in her Cock-Loft, or drinking a Flash-Cull into a fit statefor Plucking, you won’t find another Dimber Damber. And in The Foundling, that’s what gets results, starting with the means toestablish a gaming hell in Strasbourg.

Against such odds what chance does a girl stand, when her family mottoappears to be “Whoso keepeth his mouthand his tongue, keepeth his heart from troubles”? Had she but turned her Daddlesto the Prinking Lay, and not just played the Tender Parnell, she might havebeen Thick with Sale and his Smirks right from the Ale-Post to the Yoke.

In need of a slap? More like a Wisty Castor.

2011-09-18T19:17:00.000+01:00

It's only three weeks until the Romantic Novelists' Association's Regency Celebration. This is one of the few occasions on which I can wear my own Regency costume. Actually, it isn't really a Regency costume. The bottle green jacket, white waistcoat, white shirt, "nude" wool breeches and shoes are more the fashion of the first decade of the 19th Century, before Beau Brummell decided to make his old school uniform the last word in elegance. Nonetheless, I think that it will do.

Most of my outfit was made by Ages of ~~Elephants~~Elegance, who are now based in Leeds, although they were in a very unregency part of West London when I was being fitted for the costume. The shoes were made by Sarah Juniper, who is based in a remote corner of Gloucestershire.

Last time I wore the costume was for the final of University Challenge: The Professionals way back in 2005. I was amazed to discover that, more than six years on, it still just about fits. It does need a bit of ironing, and the shirt collar and cravat need a touch of starch, but nothing more major. So let us just hope that the weather is good enough - I can't really risk it in the rain.

2011-09-10T23:32:00.000+01:00

Wenlock was utterly delighted when he heard that his favourite television channel, BBC4, had commissioned one of his favourite historians, Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, to present a series on almost all of his favourite topics: Elephants and Decadence: The Age of the Regency.

The first programme in the series was an enjoyable run through the high points of Regency life - Caroline of Brunswick and Mrs Fitzherbert; Almacks and Whites; Brummell and Dandyism (with Ian Kelly); the Prince Regent's attitude towards Napoleon and the cartoonists' attitudes towards the Prince. With the sheer enthusiasm that Lucy Worsley brings to all her projects it was almost possible to forgive the total non-appearance of any elephants.

The second programme was even better, perhaps because it was more focused, and focused on one of Lucy Worsley's areas of expertise, art and architecture. Of course we had plenty of John Nash, from the overwhelming exuberance of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton to the superficial Neo-Classicism of Cumberland Terrace, but we also had John Soane - in Wenlock's opinion by far the better architect - whose reputation for refusing to compromise probably ruined his chances of obtaining the Royal commissions that he probably craved. And we also had Waterloo Bridge (not the current concrete one, but an earlier span) built by public subscription to commemorate the great victory, opened in 1817 with great ceremony, and painted by Constable, whose picture was not finished until a quarter of a century later, by when all the excitement was long forgotten, and Turner had arrived.

Still no elephants, but the third and final programme will be broadcast on Monday. Maybe it will be Behemoth-heavy to compensate.

2011-08-21T13:32:00.002+01:00

In the five-year hiatus in this blog, the Wenlock name has been picked up by no less an organisation than the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG).

It is a truth universally acknowledged that the success or failure of an Olympic Games is crucially dependent upon the choice of Olympic mascot. After all, who can forget Waldi, the rainbow-striped dachsund from the 1972 Munich games? Or Hidy and Howdy, the cowboy-hatted polar bears from 1988 in Calgary? Well, Wenlock can for one. The same goes for Roni the Raccoon from Lake Placid in 1980 and even for El Jaguar Rojo de Chichen-Itza (Mexico City 1968).

Nonetheless, the great minds of LOCOG (and I can remember when that would have made a great episode of Doctor Who) have clearly thought long and hard, and have come up with Wenlock, and his Paralympic companion, Mandeville. Wenlock is the first Olympic mascot to post on Twitter (take that, Misha! (Moscow 1980)) and to have its own page on Facebook (what have you got to say to that, Vucko? (Sarajevo 1984)).

The choice of Wenlock as the name for the mascot refers back to the Wenlock Olympian Games, an annual event founded in 1850, and witnessed by Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1890. The Olympian Society celebrated their 125th Games earlier this year.

While this Wenlock thinks the choice of this name for the Olympic mascot is a good one, and considers that the design of the mascot could be a great deal worse (compare it with the unspeakable ugly London 2012 logo), he remains disappointed about a related aspect of the Olympic planning.

In the 70 days immediately before the Opening Ceremony, we will be treated to the commercial hype and hysteria of the Olympic Torch Relay. The torch will travel the length and breadth of the country. It goes as far north as Shetland, as far west as Londonderry, as far south as Jersey and as far east as Norwich. But does it go to Much Wenlock? No it doesn't.

2011-08-08T19:36:00.000+01:00

A while ago I blogged a review of Jen Kloester's Georgette Heyer's Regency World. Six years on and a new book is on its way, Georgette Heyer: Biography of a Bestseller, although it won't be published until October.

However it looks like the pre-publication publicity has started up already, with an article in theguardian revealing that Georgette Heyer accused Barbara Cartland of plagiarism following the publication of Cartland's Knave of Hearts, which lifted its plot more or less entirely from These Old Shades (which reminds me: Léonie de Saint-Vire will be appearing on this blog fairly soon).

What puzzles me is that this is considered newsworthy. I was certainly well aware that Heyer believed that Cartland had plagiarised her, and the "evidence" described in the article - letters from Heyer to her agent, Leonard Parker Moore - is what might be expected.

However, anything that raises Heyer's profile is good news, and I look forward to the publication of Jen Kloester's book. It's just a pity that she doesn't seem to be booked to talk about it at the forthcoming Cheltenham Literature Festival.

2011-07-10T10:57:00.000+01:00

At a time when all my Romantic Novelist friends are in Caerleon and, if their Twitter feeds are to be believed, partying really quite hard, quite a few newspapers have reported on an article in the the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care which claims that:

a huge number of the issues that we see in our clinics and therapy rooms are influenced by romantic fiction.

The "we" in this quotation is supposedly a reference to therapists in Family Planning Clinics, GP Surgeries and similar places where medical professionals work with patients. But as far as I can tell the author, Susan Quilliam, has no professional qualifications at all. She has a website on which she describes herself as a "relationship psychologist", but there are no rules about who may call themselves a "psychologist", and indeed Quilliam's description of this function hardly inspires the reader with confidence:

At the moment, I not only write agony aunt columns and books; I also comment for newspapers; broadcast on radio and TV; consult on advertising campaigns; and advise on medico-sexual projects.

So it appears that the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Healthcare, an offshoot of the widely-respected BMJ, has accepted an article by an amateur with a nose for self-publicity, and splashed it to the media, for what end?

The key paragraph in Quilliam's tosh is perhaps the one that says:

If a woman learns from her 100 novels a year that romantic feeling is the most important thing, then what follows from that might be to suspend her rationality in favour of romanticism. And that might well mean not using protection with a new man because she wants to be swept up by the moment as a heroine would. It might also mean allowing that same man, a few months down the line, to persuade her to give up contraception because “we love each other”. It might mean terminating a pregnancy (or continuing with one) against all her moral codes because that same man asks her to. It might mean panicking totally if sexual desire takes a nose dive after pregnancy or because of strain – after all, such failure never happens to a heroine. It might mean – in the wake of such panic – judging that if romance has died then so has love, and that rather than working at her relationship she should be hitching her star to a new romance.

I was sorely tempted to write a piece in which a romantic hero did demonstrate all the "correct" attitudes, but I haven't for two good reasons. The first is that such an essay would miss the whole point of Romantic Fiction, which is surely escapism. And the second is that Catherine Bennett has written a brilliant article in The Observer which uses all the best gags anyway.

2011-07-02T18:00:00.000+01:00

In my 12 June post I said of the whole Kindle Store business, "suddenly self-publishing has become a little less desperate". Others have been more enthusiastic. Madame Guillotine has declared that she is "still highly enamoured with Kindle publishing and am now determined to only publish e-books from now on". And of course it has its attractions. The dozen of copies of LAC,o:tBB I've sold in the last three weeks is a dozen more than I would have sold without it. People have actually read it and said nice things about it (but nobody has yet posted a review - what, dear reader, are you waiting for?)

But. Big but. I can't really consider myself a "proper" published author.

I cannot submit LAC,o:tBB to the Man Booker committee. I am not eligible to join the Romantic Novelists' Association (except as a "New Writer", of course). So I am in something of a literary half-world.

And then, in a recent article in theguardian, Cory Doctorow argues that I perhaps shouldn't count myself as "self-published"; indeed I am not really published at all. Doctorow's argument starts from a statement by the Senior Editor at Tor Books, Patrick Nielsen Hayden.

A publisher makes a work public, it connects a work and an audience.

Taking this statement at face value, particularly the second clause, Doctorow suggests that "publication" on the Internet has become separate from the traditional functions of a traditional publisher: that is, many or all of selecting; editing; typesetting; printing; and distribution. Some of these no longer happen at all (printing, most obviously), and some can be done by the author (typesetting is built in to all the formatting done to create an uploadable file). Distribution is done by the Kindle Store. So what is left? Doctorow says:

The internet has created a large number of new kinds of publishers who act to connect works and audiences. These essentially group intosearch engines, then bloggers, curators, and tweeters, and finally suggestion algorithms (such as Amazon's "people who bought this also bought…" recommendations; Reddit's human voting system; Netflix's suggestion system).

He adds:

"Publishers" are everywhere, as general purpose as Google and as specialised as the obscure blog that manages to show a link to the three people in the world who care about it. Anyone with a future in a creative industry is going to have to make peace with this fact.

It's an interesting argument, and I'm not going to suggest that the author of one of the Internet's most read blogs is wrong, but I'm still not sure how it can get me nominated for a Booker, or into the RNA Winter Party.

2011-06-29T18:29:00.000+01:00

Heyeroines in need of a slap

25. Arabella Tallant (Arabella)

Faced with the sorry tale of the “little Tallant” the question we are forced to ask is simple: just who does she think she is? By this I do not mean “what business has she pretending to be an heiress when her clothes appear to have been knitted by a minor character from The Scarlet Pimpernel?” No indeed. There is a much deeper malaise here. Let me explain.

In our first encounter with Miss Tallant we find her, with two sisters, in the schoolroom of a Parsonage in the Yorkshire village of H_____. Who amongst us, of literary taste and refinement, cannot but be struck by this scene, yet struck more forcefully by its resemblance to a typical scene from one of the less Gothick products of the pen of Mrs Gaskell. The fact that one of the sisters, whom we shall refer to as E____, is clearly quite mad (as proven by the fact that she is seeking to insert a boiled onion in one ear) merely confirms that H_____ must indeed be H_____.

And yet. In a moment all our suppositions are overturned by the discovery of a fourth sister. We must revise our opinions. Perhaps the cromnyophilic sister is not mad E____, but poor sickly B___, and we are to imagine ourselves in Orchard House. But before the end of the chapter we discover there to be an equal number of brothers also. Arabella may well be the story of a lovely lady, but we were surely not expecting this.

The sad fact is that Miss Tallant, lacking, for whatever reason (and one possible line of argument is rehearsed in a post scriptum to this post), any literary identity of her own, seems desperate to insert herself into whatever classics of 19th Century fiction she can obtain from the lending libraries of Harrowgate (and when such fiction is unavailable, who knows how low she may stoop?) This is an affliction not without risk even in the remote fastnesses of God’s Broad Acres, but how could she be safe in London, from whose very bricks fiction and fantasy must constantly drift?

We cannot know what truly delayed Miss Tallant’s journey to London until mid-February, but I suspect that there might have been an intervention of some sort. Perhaps she had become convinced the she and Sophy were surrounded by wolves and Hanoverian plotters. Or she might have been found in a hidden garden by a young Yorkshire lad with a knack for talking to animals. Whatever the truth of the matter, her family must have worked through the issues with her during the grim winter nights and to have thought her cured. How quickly they were to be proven wrong.

Barely has she left Yorkshire when Miss Tallant diverts her journey to the implausibly named village of Arksey, where she claims to have cousins. And where these cousins have a mother, Emma, her aunt. It takes two days for these lesser Tallants to get rid of their unexpected guest, who seems to have developed a whirlwind passion for the place. Oh, Auntie Em, Auntie Em.

Our heyeroine destabilised by the discovery that she cannot stay in ~~Kansas~~Arksey any more we cannot be surprised when Miss Tallant’s perch breaks, and her body slides forward into her box (I assume that Miss Heyer knows what she is talking about here, as I for one am completely foxed). The Marston Turnpike is, alas, almost without literary merit, let alone a lending library, so Miss Tallant has little control over her situation. After all, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a Heyeroine in the general vicinity of Grantham and in want of a plot, must be in possession of a good fortune.

And in good time Miss Tallant arrives at last in London, and it is everything that she might imagine – or more accurately, everything that she might have read. Her first impressions of the metropolis are of the noise of post bells, and of wheels on cobbled streets, and of the melodious cries of charming cockney street urchins selling ~~fresh milk and sweet red roses~~ coals, brick dust, door mats and rat-traps. We can be sure that she considered herself well in.

Once established in the bracing Bridlington Household, Miss Tallant can really go to town. While the Incident of the Maid with the Toothache, must be considered an alarming attempt at fiction (the Queen of Denmark, perhaps?), it is Miss Tallant’s adoption of the role of Ellie from that nice Mr Kingsley’s mawkish morality tale that shows the depths to which she has fallen, taking as she does the unprepossessing Jemmy from that archetypal Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby, the breezy Lord Bridlington, and turning him over to her own Mrs Bedonebyasyoudid, Robert Beaumaris.

This episode is soon followed by a yet more desperate attempt, as she seeks to convert the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Street from a throwaway line in a magazine serial into a wholly different story. That the centre cannot hold, and things are falling apart, is so clearly shown when Mr Beaumaris goes off to meet his grandmother, the infamous Dowager Duchess, and finds the good dog Ulysses trotting closely behind, clearly intending that he too should take the road to Wigan’s peer (Wenlock apologises for letting that one slip through his normally rigorous editorial process).

Simply imposing her fictions upon herself, and occasionally Mr Beaumaris, might be overlooked in the broad scheme of things, but this is no longer enough for Miss Tallant, and with the arrival in London of her brother Bertram, she has a new victim. Her options are many. She could have him run up debts that would lead only to the sponging house or worse (although whether the Marshalsea would in reality be worse than the abode of Leaky Peg is a moot point). She could have him caught up in a financial scandal. But it seems that frequent visits to Richmond Park have given her flights of fancy a less urban edge, and in the end she decides to go down a more historical, even Scottish, route and so, perhaps as a result of mishearing an introduction during some dreadful squeeze, she introduces Bertram to her friend Chuffy.

But for Miss Tallant, there clearly remains a literary pinnacle yet unscaled by her erratic behaviour. I refer, of course, to the one known only as She Who Must be Read. And now the time for that apotheosis approaches. In chapter 15 of Arabella, Miss Tallant reaches for chapter 46 of That Book.

By now, of course, Mr Beaumaris has visited Miss Tallant’s family and been made aware of her true condition. Whether to encourage literary delusions in such a severe case is entirely wise must remain a matter of dispute, but it is clearly Mr Beaumaris’s chosen approach, at least for the purpose of removing her to a more secure environment. This he does in his unparalleled way and we can be relieved to know that, with Mrs Watchet and her “warm milk” always to hand, Miss Tallant will be well looked after from now on.

Post Scriptum

In searching for a possible cause of Miss Tallant’s condition I became aware that she has an air of fragility and delicately moulded lips. At first I thought this no more than proper for a Dresden China Miss, and should not, of itself, be a cause of instability. However it is clear from the book that Miss Tallant is no such thing. Indeed she may be, I fear, something rather inferior. Could her lack of a genuine character of her own be because she is not a Dresden China Miss, but a Franklin Mint Figurine?

2011-06-23T19:12:00.001+01:00

The gallery in which she stood was of immense length, and partially separated into five unequal divisions by a trellis-work of what looked to be bamboo, but which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be painted iron. The central division was surrounded by a Chinese canopy of similar trellis-work hung with bells. Above, a coved ceiling projected through the upper floor, and had set in it the light towards which the Regent had directed her notice. A chimney piece in brass and iron, worked in further imitation of bamboo, was placed directly facing the middle entrance, and on either side of it, two niches, lined with yellow marble, contained cabinets.

Wenlock had the good fortune to be invited to dine last night at the Royal Pavilion in Brighton. Before setting out I took care to re-read the description of Judith Taverner's visit as described in Georgette Heyer's Regency Buck. The Chinese Gallery is today very much as Miss Taverner saw it, and indeed as depicted in Henry Winkles' print, now held in the Royal Collection.

Before dinner we were offered a glass or two of champagne in the kitchen, a part of the Pavilion that Miss Taverner never got to see. In her day Marie-Antoine Carême would have run the kitchen, directing his staff to produce banquets like that served on 18 January 1817 for the state visit of Grand Duke Nicholas of Russia, featuring 120 different dishes. The full menu is given by The Old Foodie. The kitchen, like the Chinese Gallery, looks much as it does in this print, complete with an unfeasibly large number of small copper saucepans, although the tables have been cleared of all those silver covers. The leaves on top of the iron palm trees were added a few years after Carême's great feast.

On our way to the dinner we were given a chance to see the Music Room, in which Miss Taverner listened to a concert.

At first sight it was all a blaze of red and gold, but after her first gasp of astonishment she was able to take a clearer view of the whole, and to see that she was standing, not in some fantastic dream-palace, but in a square apartment with rectangular recesses at each end, fitted up in a style of Oriental splendour. The square part was surmounted by a cornice ornamented with shield-work, and supported by reticulated columns, shimmering with gold-leaf. Above this was an octagon gallery formed by a series of elliptical arches, and pierced by windows of the same shape. A convex cove rose over this, topped by leaf ornaments in gold and chocolate; and above this was the central dome, lined with a scale-work of glittering green and gold... I could go on, as Miss Heyer does, perhaps a little excessively, but you get the idea. And it does indeed look the same today, and as illustrated in James Agar's print.

Faced with such opulence, Miss Taverner was quite overpowered. We, however, were taken through to the Banqueting Hall.

Without a description from Miss Taverner or Miss Heyer you will need to rely on the John Nash print on the left (there is a much larger image available if you click on this one, although not for the prints above). Once again the room looked much as it did in the Pavilion's heyday, but unlike the other rooms, which are a little short of furniture after the Prince Regent's niece took most of it away in 1847, not only is the Banqueting Hall still furnished with the main table as shown, but eight smaller tables, at which we were seated, were placed along its long sides. I found myself sitting roughly where the green-jacketed gentleman is standing to the front right in Nash's illustration.

Needless to say, we were not offered les faisans truffés à la Perigueux, le turbot sauce aux crevettes, le buisson des homards or les gateaux renversés glacés au gros sucré, let alone un gros nougat à la française or a croque-en-bouche aux anis, but the food was good, the company delightful, and the setting something the like of which I am unlikely to experience again.

2011-06-20T18:06:00.001+01:00

The British Library has announced that it is to digitise some 250,000 items published between 1700 and 1870. This project will be carried out in partnership (almost inevitably) with Google. The British Library holds around 150 million items in its collections, but how many of those are from between 1700 and 1870, and thus what proportion of them will be covered by this new partnership, I have not yet been able to establish.

Any student of Behemoths will be delighted to learn that one of the newly digitised texts will be De Natuurlyke Historie van den Hippopotamus of het Rivierpaard, by George Louis Leclerc, from 1775 (admittedly translated from a French original, but with additional material, including an account of the stuffed Hippopotamus in the Prince of Orange’s cabinet of curiosities), but I am looking forward to finding out what other Georgian and Regency treasures are to become available.

There has - quite rightly - been considerable concern over Google's earlier adventures into digitising books that are still in copyright with little or no consultation with authors and other copyright holders, but I don't think that such criticisms can be levied at this venture. Most of us simply do not have the time - or the resources - to visit the British Library, or another such comprehensive reference library when researching for historical fiction. being able to access hundreds of thousands of books from home will be wonderful. The only downside I have identified is the ease with which it will be possible to become distracted from the subject in hand, and lost down random paths paved with ancient wisdom.

De Natuurlyke Historie van den Hippopotamus of het Rivierpaard, George Louis Leclerc (1775), [The Natural History of the Hippopotamus, or River Horse] - Translated from a French original but with additional material, including an account of the stuffed Hippopotamus in the Prince of Orange’s cabinet of curiosities.

2011-06-19T15:45:00.000+01:00

What, Wenlock asks, do the following have in common?

Once you have worked out the answer, Wenlock will say no more than that, over the next few months, he plans to take them, one by one, from this list, and add them to another list.

2011-06-17T23:11:00.000+01:00

This is annoying. The runaway success of Lord Alexander's Cipher, or: the Bridekirk Behemoth (it sold a second copy in the US today) made me think of digging out the start that I made on a sequel just over five years ago. I blogged about it at the time. The laptop on which I wrote it was stolen a few years ago, but I thought that I had the draft backed up on a USB stick.

After much searching on the deepest recesses of the writing room in Wenlock Towers I found the USB stick, only to discover that of the sequel there was no trace. So I shall have to start all over again.

I do remember that he story opened with the unfortunate destruction by fire of a Chinese Pagoda in St James's Park. This happened in the summer of 1814 and was believed at the time to have been an accident. Five years ago I had a cunning explanation; I'll have to think it up again.

So, to ease my frustration I decided to put together a teaser cover. The title is just a place holder. Those who have read LAC,o:tBB will have a fair idea who the orphan might be, but whether she actually will play a leading role in this one I don't know. The heroine will be a person mentioned only in passing in the first book, and the hero probably won't be Lord Alexander, although he will be playing a part. I won't really know what to call this one until it is written - whenever that might be.

2011-06-15T00:15:00.000+01:00

My newspaper of choice, theguardian, has just published a list of the 100 best non-fiction books ever written, and actually, it's not a bad list.

Which doesn't mean I agree with it from end to end. OK, so it would take a bit of special pleading to persuade the editors of the merits of Wenlock's style bible, On Dandyism by Jules Amédée Barbey-d'Aurevilly (1845), not least because it is really no more than an essay. Similarly Paterson's Roads (1785, and updated regularly thereafter), for all that it is an essential guide to travel by coach along the principal turnpikes of England, probably fails the readability test. However there are a few more obvious omissions.

On a wet summer's evening Wenlock likes little better than to curl up with a mug of gin and a good dictionary. Both Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and the Rev John Lemprière's A Classical Dictionary (1788) are delightful reads, and deserve a place on the list.

On a less wet summer's evening, the only thing that will do is a good game of cricket, and that is best captured by C L R James in his Beyond a Boundary (1963). Miss Austen, in Northanger Abbey, refers to a children's game by the name of "baseball", and even that has its literature, perhaps most memorably in The Boys of Summer (1976) by Roger Kahn.

Had Wenlock world enough, and time, no doubt I could come up with so many more worthy candidates, but perhaps my last choice for now would be from the realm of Euterpe. Perhaps the only way to understand what is going on in 20th Century "classical" music is to read The Rest is Noise, by Alex Ross.

2011-06-12T22:53:00.000+01:00

Apart from a pointer to a blog that never really got going, it has been almost five years since I last posted here, and the world has not stopped moving. Most significantly, from the lofty perspective of Wenlock Towers, Amazon has introduced the Kindle, and with it, the Kindle Store.

Suddenly self-publishing has become a little less desperate, and as hordes of other writers drag their much-loved but misunderstood masterpieces out from under their beds, and try to work out what a Mobipocket might be, I have done so too.

A weekend spent reading, rereading and proof reading Lord Alexander's Cipher, and playing around with image manipulation programs and free fonts, has resulted in the arrival of the Behemoth in the Kindle Store for readers in the territories served by Amazon's operations in the United States, United Kingdom and Germany.

If you have a Kindle, then you can try the first chapter and a half for free. If not there is a free Kindle emulator for the PC and the Mac, and of course apps for android smartphones and all those iThings.

So give it a go - and tell me what you think, whether by commenting here, or leaving a review at Amazon.

2009-09-27T12:24:00.000+01:00

Just to say that while Wenlock is no more, something should be coming soon at Berowne...

2006-11-15T23:19:00.000Z

Regular readers will have noticed that I have not posted since early October. This hiatus was initially caused by the moving of Wenlock Towers some half a mile to the South, and its rebuilding in a the modern Palladian style, facing in a new direction. Such works take time.

However that disruption has been followed by various other changes to my circumstances (mainly a new role at my place of gainful employ), which are leaving me less time both to read and to write articles for this blog.

At the same time my agent and I have reluctantly concluded that Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth is unlikely to find a publisher (although the latest highly complimentary rejection described it as "Buchanesque", which is nice) so I must turn my attentions to producing something new.

All of which is building up to my saying that Wenlock will be going into indefinite hibernation. I hope to return to the Blogosphere in due course, either here or in a new form, but until then I would like to thank all my readers and commenters for the support that you have provided me over the last year and several months.

2006-10-08T14:04:00.000+01:00

It's Cheltenham Literary Festival time, and while I am not going to many events, I did go to a very interesting session yesterday called New Grub Street, and featuring Scott Pack, former chief buyer for Waterstones, now part of The Friday Project, Susan Hill, a writer who set up a publishing house, Ion Trewin, the chair of the Festival Committee and former Literary Editor of the Times, publisher and many other things, Patrick Neate, writer and guest director for the first weekend of the Festival, and Danuta Kean, booktrade commentator and former chair of the Romantic Novel of the Year judges. They said a great deal of interest, but today I want to focus on one thing, a cautionary tale mentioned in passing by Susan Hill.

I don't know whether you remember, but a couple of years ago Hill, having set up Long Barn Books as a small publisher, held a competition to select the first work of fiction that she would publish. The competition attracted 3,741 entrants and the winner was Helen Slavin's The Extra Large Medium.

According to the Long Barn website:

A US publishing deal has been agreed.
An Australian/New Zealand publishing deal has been agreed.
And, advance orders are so good the novel is REPRINTING BEFORE PUBLICATION. !!

The book was published in May. Long Barn gave it a 2,000 print run, and secured a 3 for 2 deal with Waterstones, who took 1,600 copies. It was in the shops when the reviews came out - good reviews mainly, and more than usual because of the background. And Beryl Bainbridge had a shout on the cover:

"The Extra Large Medium is very, very good... no unnecessary words or explanations, just good, and also witty. A highly original talent. Helen Slavin should be encouraged, I've no doubt about that."

At yesterday's talk, Susan Hill said that the returns window had just about closed, and Waterstones had returned 1,400 copies.

2006-10-04T19:27:00.000+01:00

The last part of Reader, I Married Him was broadcast on Monday evening, and focused on heroines.

After my disappointment with the selection of heroes in episode 2 I am delighted to report that Daisy Goodwin and co did a very much better job with heroines, looking at them from the 18th Century Gothic novels through to Bridget Jones.

Goodwin dismissed the heroines of Gothic novels (such as The Castle of Otranto, from which she quoted) as rather feeble. While I have a certain soft spot for the more, well, gothic of the Gothic novels (Matthew Lewis's (left) The Monk, for instance), I cannot dispute any suggestion that the heroines are not their strongest point.

Jane Austen must have had the same views, as she satirised gothic in Northanger Abbey, and came up with much stronger heroines in her later books. Goodwin, predictably, picked out Elizabeth Bennet for particular scrutiny, illustrated by Jennifer Ehle. Personally I think that Emma Woodhouse might have been an even better case study, but the best recent adaptation was not made by the BBC.

From Austen we moved on to the Brontës, or rather Jane Eyre, with plenty of time to dwell on Toby Stephens and Ruth Wilson. Charlotte Brontë created Jane Eyre in part at least as a response to Austen's heroines and Goodwin brought out the contrast well, even if we did spend too long on the nature of governesses (but with nobody suggesting that they were "half of them detestable and the rest ridiculous, and all incubi").

"My dearest, don't mention governesses; the word makes me nervous. I have suffered a martyrdom from their incompetency and caprice. I thank Heaven I have now done with them!"

Then it started to get interesting, for we moved into the 20th Century and alighted upon Madame Zalenska from Elinor Glyn's Three Weeks. Goodwin took the book to a reading group in Yorkshire, and concluded from their responses that time has not been kind to Elinor Glyn, and, judging by the clips from a 1977 production, neither were Thames Television, with Elizabeth Shepherd vamping for all she was worth over a rather bored looking tiger skin, and a young Simon McCorkindale as Paul Verdayne not really knowing where to look.

It was no surprise that our next heroine saw Goodwin back in her crinoline and walking the streets of Atlanta in search of Scarlett O'Hara. I am probably alone in thinking that the world might be a better place if Margaret Mitchell had stuck to her original idea of naming her heroine "Pansy" and Melanie Hamilton "Permalia".

Unfortunately the urge to illustrate the whole discussion with old films and television dramatisations took a turn for the worse when Goodwin moved on to Georgette Heyer. Jenny Haddon, chair of the RNA, said some wonderful things about Heyer, as did Elizabeth Buchan and assorted others, but this was somewhat undercut by a short clip from the abominable film of The Reluctant Widow, and a brief extract from Venetia where she and Damerel discuss his orgies, accompanied by shots of neon signs from sex shops.

But at least Heyer was given plenty of space. The heroines of early feminist fiction (I am thinking of Isadora Wing, for instance) were skipped completely and we landed in the 1980s with Barbara Taylor Bradford's Emma Harte. The Yorkshire reading group found that she, too, had not aged well. Many had read it 25 years ago when it had seemed to capture some sort of Zeitgeist, but, like Kenneth More and Nyree Dawn Porter in The Forsyte Saga, it is one of those things that is best left to the fond embrace of memory. Bradford herself was good value in interview, however.

From Emma Harte's 1980s the final stop was Bridget Jones' 1990s, and the rise of Chick Lit.

Along the way Goodwin asked some interesting questions about what a romantic heroine is looking for. In the 19th Century it was inevitably marriage - but not necessarily marriage on any terms. In the 21st Century it is a great deal more complicated than that. Goodwin's final session, with a group of schoolgirls, did not really come up with any suggestions about where the romantic heroine goes next, but it is something worth thinking about.

2006-09-26T20:00:00.000+01:00

It would be dreadfully churlish of me to be negative about the BBC devoting three hours of prime time (albeit digital-only) programming to a discussion of the Romantic Novel, but I feel that Reader, I Married Him could be doing so much more.

The second episode was broadcast last night (and will be repeated a few times later this week, including immediately after Jane Eyre next Sunday night). It focused on the Romantic Hero.

In fact for 55 of the 60 minutes it focused on just four heroes. The usual suspects: F Darcy, E Rochester, H Heathcliff* and R Butler.

While there was nothing wrong with what they said about any of them (except perhaps for poor Daisy Goodwin swanning around Atlanta in a Scarlett O'Hara dress, oh, and the cringe-making e-fit Mr Darcy bit) I couldn't see why the programme needed to spend so much time on just those four. Of course there was plenty of opportunity to show clips from the various film and television adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, but this programme was supposed to be about romantic fiction: books, not films and television programmes. Goodwin even made the point that Austen gives virtually no physical description of Darcy, and part of his success must be the scope he gives readers to picture him however they like (the point of the e-fit segment). She then completely undermined her argument by tracking down Andrew Davies to talk about Colin Firth's wet shirt.

I cannot deny that I found Goodwin's views on Heathcliff absolutely spot on, but did we need all those clips, and our Daisy strolling out on the wiley, windy moors? Did we need so many writers gushing over Darcy and Rochester? For having spent all of those 55 minutes on analysing these four old warhorses, there was no time left, for, for instance, a discussion about how the romantic hero has (or has not) evolved since the days of Jane Austen and the Brontës (I have to confess to having little time for Margaret Mitchell, whose book, had it not been made into such a sumptuous film, would probably be long-forgotten by now).

Given that she was talking to Jilly Cooper, Goodwin could have considered with her whether Rupert Campbell-Black was simply Darcy/Rochester/Heathcliff in modern dress, or something new. Talking to Maddie Rowe of Mills and Boon, Goodwin could have explored why, when Darcy/Rochester/Heathcliff are very English, Mills and Boon Modern heroes (the real Alpha males of the genre) are nowadays almost always foreign. Having talked to Sophie Kinsella and Marian Keyes for the first programme, they could have asked them how the chick-lit hero (or indeed the hero of romantic comedies of all sorts) gets away with not being an Alpha male, and what that says about readers' relationship with romantic comedy as opposed to straight romance - particularly given the "having an affair with the hero" concept that Katie Fforde talked about during the creative writing workshop that Goodwin attended.

All in all I came away feeling that this was a bit of a missed opportunity to explore the romantic hero of today, rather than just wallowing in the same old same old.

* "It was the name of a son who died in childhood, and it has served him ever since, both for Christian and surname." Wuthering Heights, Chapter IV.

2006-09-19T21:01:00.000+01:00

It's been a while since I mentioned Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth. For the last few of months it has been going out from Anne-Marie, my excellent agent, to a select number of editors, as is the way of these things, and, as is the way of these things, a few rejections have come back. Nothing like as many as J K Rowling received at this stage in her writing career, though, so I still have a way to go.

Today's update from Anne-Marie brought a very positive rejection:

"very impressed with the fluency of the writing ... there's a huge amount of potential here for his career as a writer"

but a rejection nonetheless. Anne-Marie also alerted me to news in the Bookseller that Harper Collins had just picked up a first novel about a search for treasure buried with Alexander the Great. Its title: The Alexander Cipher.

So it looks like I will need to find a new title sooner rather than later - and certainly before Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth is submitted to Harper Collins.

2006-09-17T13:29:00.000+01:00

Jojo Moyes (left) commented on my last post to say that Daisy Goodwin did have a valid point when she said:

"female readers of romantic fiction were still generally dismissed by the men who run literary papers."

And a similar point was made by Debbie Taylor (below), the editor of Mslexia, in a piece in today's Independent.

"Men simply don't like women's writers," Taylor says. "When men buy fiction they won't go near women's fiction." But with more women becoming publishing editors and newspaper literary editors, some of the hurdles women writers face are being removed. "It's not that they prefer books by women but situations that were actively hostile to women in the past aren't any more," she says.

The first quote there is something of a sweeping statement. Looking back at my holiday reading, I find that five of the six books that I read were by women. I would also challenge the way that Taylor switches between "women's fiction" and "books by women" as if these were the same thing.

I have had a look at some recent broadsheet book review sections. Friday's Independent has five proper reviews of novels (I am ignoring short stories, poetry and children's fiction for the purposes of this exercise):

Elizabeth Speller on The Fall of Troy by Peter Ackroyd
Roz Kaveny on The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
Christina Patterson on Arlington Park by Rachel Cusk
Wendy Brandmark on Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl
Shusha Guppy on Glass Houses by Sandra Howard

There is also a mini-review of Caryl Phillip's Dancing in the Dark (just out in paperback).

Saturday's theguardian has four full reviews of novels:

Helen Dunmore on Restless by William Boyd
James Lasdun on Arlington Park
Peter Dempsey on Special Topics in Calamity Physics
Rowan Pelling on Vocational Girl by "Rosa Mundi"

Maxim Jakubowki provides four mini-reviews of recent hardback crime fiction by Dorothy Hughes, RS Downie, Andrew Klavan and Laurie R King, and there are paperback mini-reviews of novels by Nicholas Evans, Katherine Bucknell, JM Coetzee, Simon Ings and Maj Sjowall/Per Wahloo.

What does this tell us, if anything. One thing that struck me was that all the Independent reviews (with the exception of the Caryl Phillips mini) were written by women, but that is not immediately relevant.

Of the seven books given full reviews, four were by women and three by men. Of the paperback minis, four and a half were by men and one and a half by women (Maj Slowall is a woman and Per Wahloo a man). Of the crime minis one was by a man and three by women.

This is of course far too small a sample to draw firm conclusions upon, but it does not suggest an overwhelming bias towards male writers.

There is of course the fact that Crime is widely seen as popular fiction for men, and there is a crime round-up but no equivalent Romantic round-up, but that does not seem to have disadvantaged female writers per se.

But I said above that I did not accept that "books by women" and "women's fiction" are the same thing. Of the books reviewed, can any be considered "women's fiction"? I think that two of them can be. Sandra Howard's Glass Houses fits very comfortably into the category and so, arguably, does Vocational Girl (behind that Rosa Mundi pseudonym lurks Fay Weldon).

Glass Houses is given a very positive review ("Howard weaves the varied strands of her ingenious plot into a smooth and exciting narrative"), Vocational Girl less so ("fearful tosh"), but it appears that this week at least, two broadsheet newspapers have given over space to publish proper reviews not just of books by women, but of women's fiction.

Does two reviews out of nine reflect the relative sales of women's fiction when compared to fiction as a whole? Of course not.

But should the balance of books reviewed in broadsheet book sections reflect the overall pattern of sales? Now that is a question that I will return to at some later date.

2006-09-13T20:12:00.000+01:00

Apologies for the gap in posting. It's the shock of going back to work after a long break.

In a diversion from what I did on my holidays, I thought that I would mention Reader, I Married Him, coming to BBC4 on Monday. If you watch you may even get a glimpse of Wenlock himself. I took part in a creative writing workshop with Katie Fforde that was filmed for the programme, and Daisy Goodwin interviewed me during a break in proceedings. I also answered a few vox pop questions at the RNA Awards dinner at the Savoy. Of course these may well have ended up on the cutting room floor.

Or maybe not. Perhaps my appearance will be used to support the apparent thesis of the programme, that men cannot write romance.

Whether or not I can write (good) romance is a matter of opinion, but the suggestion that "you can't have a really seriously-written romantic book written by a man" because male writers "lack insight into the ways of women" is patently absurd, and here's why.

If the only way to write credible female characters is to be a woman, then it must be because there is some aspect of being a woman that is fundamentally different from being a man. And this must be something that all women have in common with each other (within the fiction-reading world, at least), or else women couldn't write characters that were credible to all other women.

Now I know that there have been a few books published recently in the US that claim that male and female brains are indeed fundamentally different, particularly in terms of development through childhood and adolescence. Leonard Sax's Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences is one of these, and Louann Brizendine's The Female Brain is another. Both books have been used to argue for single sex education, and they are both full of claims about fundamental differences between male and female brains, backed up with meaty looking citations of academic studies.

The trouble is that the studies do not actually support the claims in these books. They have been neatly debunked in places such as Language Log (here, here, and indeed here). There are no studies that do lend any support to there being significant differences between men and women in this respect. These books - and the Daisy Goodwin hypothesis - appear to rely on something akin to interpreting "men are taller than women" as meaning that all men are taller than any women.

ANd there's more. Goodwin is quoted as saying "female readers of romantic fiction were still generally dismissed by the men who run literary papers". Now, if men and women are so different that only women can write credible female characters, it is surely the case that only men can write credible male characters. Now most of the time this is not an issue, because female readers ("lacking insight into the minds of men" we must assume) would not spot the lack of credibility. But these mysterious "men who run literary papers" (what is a "literary paper"? Does theguardian count, or is it just the London Review of Books (edited by Mary-Kay Wilmers) and the TLS?) obviously do. Perhaps the whole image problem that romantic fiction has is due to the inability of female authors to write male characters?

Clearly this is rubbish. I would like to challenge Daisy Goodwin to read two or three romantic novels written by men and two or three written by women, without knowing who the authors are, and to declare which are which.

Not that this is really necessary, as women buy books by Jessica Stirling, Gill Sanderson, Jessica Blair, Emma Blair and many others without complaining that the authors - all men - "lack insight into the ways of women".

And if you do see me on the programme, remember that the camera adds pounds. And years. And the lighting can make almost anybody look as if they are losing their hair. You'd get a much better idea of what I look like over at Julie Cohen's site.

2006-08-28T21:16:00.000+01:00

One cannot visit Italy without seeing some fantastic frescoes. Young Wenlock and I spent an hour or so queuing up outside the Vatican so that we could traipse through the museums before ending up in the Sistine Chapel, but given its reputation, the ceiling was always going to be a bit of a disappointment. I did quite like the Last Judgement, but Young Wenlock was more taken by Hannibal invading Italy on the wall of the Palazzo dei Conservatori.

Frescoes being found indoors, usually, and restrictions placed on taking photographs, the rest of this post will be illustrated by other people's pictures. What I have found, however, is that they rarely tend to capture the colourfulness of the real thing.

Siena has some wonderful frescoes. Simone Martini's Maesta of 1315, in the Palazzo Publico, is a great deal brighter and bluer than this picture (or the larger version that it links to) would have you believe. You might get a better idea of the colours from the Siena website, but their picture is so very blurred.

Opposite the Maesta is a slightly controversial fresco, the Equestrian Portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano. If it really is also by Martini, as has long been believed, it would be one of the earliest Italian portraits. It would also have anachronistic castles. There is therefore an increasingly strong case (supported by suggestions of previous works underneath this one, that it is not by Martini, and that it may be a 16th Century fake. But even if it is a later work it is still spectacular.

Martini is good, but the really star of Sienese frescoes was Ambrogio Lorenzetti, whose Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338-1340) is also in the Palazzo Publico. This is a set of six pictures. Two are allegorical images of Siena under good and bad governments (the former is better preserved than the latter). Then there are pictures showing the effect on town and countryside of good and bad government. The former are, again, better preserved than the latter).

Next time I will say a bit about Florence, including the fantastic frescoes by Domenico Ghirlandaio in the Capella Tornabuoni of Santa Maria Novella.

2006-08-24T14:39:00.000+01:00

One reason for continuing with the Wenlock Grand Tour, despite Mrs Wenlock's accident (she is recovering very well, and should be out of her sling in two weeks from today), was that the third part of the journey would put us in Siena at Palio time.

Strictly speaking, the Palio is a silk banner, as seen on the left, being paraded from the Duomo. In practice the word is used to refer to the horse race for which it is the prize. There are two races each year, on 2 July and 16 August, and Siena is packed in the days leading up to the race, despite the fact that, as an event, it makes no real concessions to non-Sienese. The Palio remains a thoroughly local event.

The race is contested in the Piazza del Campo, in the heart of the town, between horses representing ten of the city's seventeen contrade, or districts. In the days before the race itself practice races are run, and it is not uncommon to run into the horse of one or other contrada at the front of a passionate, chanting crowd of its contradaioli, on the way to or from one of these races. On the right is Zodiach, wearing the colours of Nicchio, the Noble Contrada of the Shell. I will say more of the race in another post.

The contrade are far more than supporters of a particular team in a horse race. They play a role in almost all the major rites of passage of every Sienese life, from a second baptism in your native contrada's fountain (the Wenlock Heir is shown here beside the fountain of Pantera, the Contrada of the Leopard), through education - summer camps for the youth of the contrada, for instance, marriage - almost invariably in the contrada's own Church, and support, both social and financial, in old age.

The territories of the different contrade are marked out on building walls, so that you can always tell in whose patch you are walking. In this case we are in the territory of Bruco, the Noble Contrada of the Caterpillar. The contrade are often given credit for the remarkably low levels of crime in Siena. However some (but by no means all) of the contrade have historic rivalries with each other - Pantera and Aquila, the Noble Contrada of the Eagle, for instance. In the build-up to the race, these rivalries can turn into street fights among small gangs of contrada youths. It is therefore sensible to be conscious of the risks of wearing the yellow and turquoise of Tartuca, the Contrada of the Turtle, when wandering the streets of Chiocciola, the Contrada of the Snail. Little street markers help.

But in Palio time the street markers are supplemented by the banners that fly from every building, and run down every street. The two banners on the left mark the border between Tartuca and Chiocciola, although we saw no signs of trouble as we walked by.

As might be expected, there is more noise and enthusiasm within the contrade who have horses running in the race than among those that do not, and the whole North-Eastern corner of town was a quiet refuge from the crowded masses, with Istrice, Lupa, Giraffa, Leocorno and Civetta taking no part, and of the competing contrade only Bruco amongst them.

It is not only the banners that brighten up Siena in Palio time. Frequently we heard the sound of drumming coming down the streets, signalling the passage of a procession of contrada heralds heading to or from one or other of the pre-Palio ceremonies. Here the banners of Oca, the Noble Contrada of the Goose, and Valdemontone, the Contrada of the Ram.

All seventeen contrade carry their stemme, or banners, in these parades, and indeed on the day of the race there are even representatives of six other contrade, Gallo (the Chicken), Leone (the Lion), Orso (the Bear), Quercia (the Oak Tree), Spadaforte (the Broadsword) and Vipera (the Snake) that no longer exist, following the decree of 1729 which set down the present boundaries.

The Palio is not some folkloric pageant. It has been in continuing existence since the Thirteenth Century, and while it has evolved in many ways (the current contrada heraldry is 19th Century, as the Royal insignia of the Savoy King Umberto on many of the stemme attests). I cannot claim to have understood much of what we saw while we were in Siena, but I found it fascinating. I am glad that we were there for it, and I look forward to going back some day, with a deeper understanding of how Siena works, to appreciate another Palio. I do know, however, that I will never be able to be properly part of it, as I am not Sienese. But that, I think, is one of the Palio's great strengths.

2006-08-22T13:23:00.000+01:00

Most people, looking for the remains of the Empire in Rome, head for the Flavian Amphitheatre and the Forum. Queuing for ages in the former, and surrounded by crowds of fellow visitors in the latter, it is frankly impossible really to imagine what life was like when these places were in use. In any case, all you see are the remains of public buildings - mostly temples and triumphal arches.

The site of Ostia Antica, a 20-minute train ride away (1€ single fare) provides a huge contrast.

There are temples and baths here, of course (rather a lot of baths). There is a theatre too. But there are also ordinary houses, and taverns and snack bars. And they are very well preserved.

Young Wenlock was particularly taken by this caupona by the Marine Gate (towards the top left of the aerial view. Like many of the buildings in Ostia (but like few Imperial Roman buildings anywhere else) the Caupona of Alexander and Helix has intact walls and a ceiling. It dates from the early 3rd Century AD, and standing inside it one can almost imagine what it was like in its heyday - not unlike some contemporary Italian drinking establishments, I suspect.

The theatre at Ostia ("not as big as the one at Caerleon," according to Young Wenlock, who went there on a school visit) has been restored somewhat, and is used for dramatic productions. Behind the theatre lies the Forum of the Corporations (the tree-filled area just to the right of the theatre in the aerial view). This is a wonderful place. It was, apparently, where one would go to find somebody to transport goods. It consisted of an open square with a collonade or cloister around it. The cloister had a mosaic floor, and each patch of mosaic reflected the goods that the shipper, whose little office was behind that part of the cloister, dealt in, or the part of the world with which they traded.

Apparently the "MC" on the amphora in the picture has been interpreted as meaning that this was the office of traders from Mauretania Caesariensis (modern Algeria). Whether the fish signify that they dealt specifically in fish products, I do not know. Since the staple ingredient of all Roman dishes is ~~dormice~~ garum, a fermented fish sauce, this would certainly be possible. Perhaps MC salsamentum was the HP Sauce of its day.

The barely legible inscription above this creature reads STAT SABRATENSIVM. Sabrata is modern Libya, and this is suggested to be a dealer in wild animals or ivory products from there. There is a second elephant mosaic, but the beast is the wrong way up for good photography. He may well have been advertising wild animals from Egypt.

I didn't take as many photographs as I might have done, given the need to keep an eye on the Wenlock Heir, so I cannot show you the apartment blocks, the mausolea, the comfortable houses with frescoed walls still in place, the several other baths with spectacular mosaics which it was quite possible to walk on, or the public toilets. All I can do is recommend that if you are interested in Roman ruins, this is better than the Forum in Rome, and possibly better than Pompeii. It is certainly less crowded. Once you get past the theatre and the baths of Neptune next door, the site seems almost deserted, even in the middle of summer.

2006-08-20T15:31:00.000+01:00

With so much travel involved in the Grand Tour, and with the Wenlock Heir's predisposition to spend the heat of the day splashing around in swimming pools, and with such trips being, in principle, about relaxation and enjoyment, selecting the right reading matter was an important part of holiday planning in the Wenlock household. I wanted, as far as possible, books that would give me a feel for the places we were visiting: Rome, Florence and Siena. For Florence a useful starting point was Fictional Cities, which is perhaps why I did better on that city than on the other two.

The one book that covered Siena was Mary Hoffman's City of Stars. This is the second in the Stravaganza series, young adult books set in an alternative 16th Century Italy and involving visitors from 21st Century North London to a world dominated by the De Chimici family. The focus of City of Stars is a version of the Palio, Siena's famous horse race (of which much more in another post). The third book, City of Flowers, addresses an alternative Florence, and the machinations of the head of the De Chimici family, which bare considerable similarities to aspects of de Medici activities. Highly recommended.

Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus is a brilliant capturing of late 15th Century Florence, when the de Medicis were briefly eclipsed, folowing the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, by both the invading armies of the Holy Roman Emperor and by the fanatical preaching of Giralamo Savonarola. She captures the growing menace of Savonarola's rabble rousing, the approaching French army, and the threat of plague brilliantly, entwining it around a brilliantly characterised heroine. I found this book a real page-turner, but one that was also deeply satisfying to look back upon; a rare combination.

Mark, at Mostly Books, suggested Umberto Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, although it is not set in Rome, Florence or Siena. I have read and enjoyed all of Eco's earlier novels (of which Baudolino might have been the most relevant to this trip) and had planned to read this one at some point anyway, so Mark did not need to nudge me very hard. Like all of Eco's books it contains plenty of philosophical speculation, on identity and memory in particular. The protagonist is a man who has lost his memory of his own life, but not of all the facts that he has learned through the years. Eco uses this device, among other things, to explore the Italian national psyche during the Second World War, and how this was reflected in popular culture - comic books, popular music and so on. If this makes it all sound very dry, it shouldn't do. It was a wonderful book and, unusually for a novel, it is richly illustrated with examples of the popular culture which it discusses. I learned a great deal from it about Italy in the second quarter of the last Century.

I picked Christobel Kent's story of goings on among the English expat community in Florence, A Party in San Niccolo, from the review on Fictional Cities and I was not disappointed. As the review makes clear this is a book that contains murder and mystery without being a murder mystery. It helped give me a feel for Florence before we arrived, but the story takes place in the spring, when the streets of town are not packed with tourists, whose activities rather drown out any sense of what the city is like to live in year-round.

Judy Astley's Blowing It was a complete break from Italy, but was just the sort of book to read while dealing long-distance with insurance companies and others while sorting out Mrs Wenlock's emergency flight home. Judy claims that it is not one of her best, but it is still a well-constructed tale of a slightly unconventional family almost falling apart and eventually sorting themselves out. The central character, Lottie, is married to the former lead singer of a 70s soft rock band (Charisma, described as a cross between Fairport Convention and Fleetwood Mac, which I still struggle to imagine). Their philosophy of life tends to involve throwing themselves into new ventures without much thought for the consequences, and with the income from Charisma's back catalogue falling their latest plan, to have a "gap year" themselves, now that their youngest child is about to do the same before University, involves selling the huge but crumbling family home, to the horror of their somewhat conventional children.

I found Emma Tennant's Felony in the BM Bookstore in Florence. It has to count as liteary fiction on many levels. It tells of Claire Clairmont's last days in the late 19th Century. Clairmont was a friend and lover of Byron and Shelley, and was with them at the Villa Diodati near Geneva when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein and John Polidori wrote The Vampyre. In her eighties she lived in Florence where she was preyed upon by an American sea captain with a Shelley obsession who hoped to inherit her papers when she died. This (true) story was the inspiration for Henry James' The Aspern Papers, and Tennant weaves an account of James researching and writing that book in the 1880s with Clairmont's woes in the 1870s. Interesting, if not quite as gripping as Dunant's story.

Meanwhile the Wenlock Heir, having visited the site of Ostia Antica, spent his free hours devouring the series of Roman Mysteries written by Caroline Lawrence. He found these so gripping that he would bring them along to restaurants, and at times would choose reading over splashing about in the pool. He worked his way through five of the series and would have read more if I could have found them in the local shops.

2006-08-19T21:11:00.000+01:00

Back from Italy. Not the smoothest of Grand Tours, as a result of Mrs Wenlock slipping and falling on the way down from the Tarpeian Rock. She did not hurt herself quite as badly as, say, Spurius Cassius did, but she did break her arm and dislocate her shoulder. She therefore returned home to recuperate, leaving me to continue the adventure together with the Wenlock Heir.

Over the next few days I will post some edited highlights of our peregrinations, starting with What We Read On Our Tour, and going on to cover such issues as the best meals we had (although Wenlock does not claim to be a foodblog), the best frescoes (although Wenlock is also no artblog), and the best elephants we saw (which is closer to Wenlock core business). Regency allusions will probably be thin on the ground, but I shall do my best to slip them in when I can.

2006-08-02T15:27:00.000+01:00

This will be my last post for a couple of weeks, as the Wenlock family is about to head off on the Grand Tour, visiting Rome, Florence and Siena, by means of tunnels under the sea, and great horseless carriages running on metal rails.

It was in preparation for this adventure that I dropped in on Mostly Books, in Abingdon, to pick up some holiday reading. I have mentioned Mostly Books here previously, but this was the first chance I have had of visiting, and seeing how Mark and Nicki were doing after exactly a month in business. That's Mark in the picture, and so far he seems to be surviving.

The shop is very pleasant. In addition to the main shelving area (as seen in the photo at the bottom), there is a separate room for children's books, in which children can amuse themselves while their parents browse among the main shelves, and then there is a courtyard at the back, where coffee is served at weekends. The courtyard seems incredibly quiet and peaceful, despite it being right in the heart of a busy town, and near a rather bust street.

Mostly Books is a fairly small bookshop, and cannot carry everything, but I was pleasantly surprised how many of the books on the shelves were ones that I had read and enjoyed. It gave me confidence that I would probably enjoy many of the rest too. In the end I came away with a copy of Umberto Eco's latest, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which Mark is currently reading himself, and the latest by Judy Astley, Blowing It, not because it has anything to do with Italy, but because she's a friend of mine and I liked the last one of hers that I read. Those two, combined with Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus, already on my to-be-read pile, and Mary Hoffman's City of Flowers, which Mostly Books had on stock order but which had not shown up, should keep me going until, well, until the train reaches Rome...

If you are in or around Abingdon, then do go and visit Mostly Books (and tell them that I sent you). Abingdon is a bit of a traffic nightmare, but there are car parks available and, something that I only discovered after parking illegibly on the pavement, there is free motorcycle parking tucked away just behind the bookshop.

I'll be back in just over two weeks, armed with pictures, now that I have a camera that works.

2006-07-27T21:07:00.000+01:00

Regency Recollections; Captain Gronow's Guide to Life in London and Paris edited by Christopher Summerville

Reminiscences of Captain Gronow, Formerly Of The Grenadier Guards And Member Of Parliament For Stafford, Being Anecdotes Of The Camp, The Court, And The Clubs, At The Close Of The Last War With France, Related By Himself, together with its three, thankfully more succinctly titled, sequels is one of the most valuable sources of information on the Regency haut ton, but it has not always been that easy to get hold of. Indeed the most recent edition listed on Amazon, from 2004, has a sales ranking of "none", which is quite an achievement.

Now Ravenhall Books have come to the rescue, with a well-designed and well-produced edition from Christopher Summerville, a historian and writer specialising in the early nineteenth century, and author of Napoleon's Polish Gamble.

Summerville states in his preface:

My purpose in presenting this volume of Gronow's celebrated memoirs is to serve up a palatable slice of Regency history for the general reader. To this end, I have strived to prepare a book that is light, pleasing, easily digested, and moreish.

The result is a selection from Gronow's work, concentrating on the Regency period (Gronow's Reminiscences cover his life all the way through to 1865), and arranged in broadly chronological order. This produces a book of four parts, covering the Peninsular War, Waterloo, Restoration Paris, and Regency London.

Editorial additions include a biographical sketch of the Captain, and short essays providing the historical context for each section. There is a sprinkling of explanatory footnotes, explaining people and things mention in the text. Summerville admits to having modernised Gronow's punctuation, and has apparently "restructured" one or two of his anecdotes. He has also unsuppressed a few names, where these are known. There are 16 pages of black and white plates in the midle of the book, mostly portraits and cartoons illustrating people mentioned in Gronow's accounts.

The one thing that the book lacks is an index. It is a pity that it is not possible to look up "Almack's" or "Manton's" and go straight to some half-remebered anecdote involving one or the other.

Despite the omission this is a very nice volume, and I must credit Mrs Wenlock for finding it and giving it to me as a birthday present.

So much for the book. What about the Captain himself? I have to say that I don't warm to the man. He is never slow to put down others and boast about himself. For example, the anecdote about Manton's Shooting Gallery is one of several designed to denigrate Byron (he secretly used curlers on his hair, he frequently went boating with a lad who was possibly a girl in disguise). Having mocked Byron's high opinion of his (Byron's) shooting, Gronow adds

Lords Byron, Yarmouth, Pollington, Mountjoy, Wallscourt, Blandford, Captain Burges, Jack Bouverie, and myself were in 1814 - and for several years afterwards - amongst the chief and most frequenters of this well-known shooting-gallery and frequently shot at the wafer for considerable sums of money. Manton was allowed to enter the betting list and he generally backed me.

But the most egregious example of Gronow's unpleasantness appears in his account of the Spa Fields Riots. In November 1816, the Reform movement organised a rally in Spa Fields, in Clerkenwell, with the aim of petitioning the Prince Regent to reform Parliament. Gronow had been sent with a company of Guards to occupy the nearby prison and "to act, if necessary, in aid and support of the civil power." The crowd of 10,000 (described by Gronow as a mob of 60-70,000) was eventually ordered to disperse, before they could be addressed by one of the great advocates of electoral reform, Henry "Orator" Hunt. Gronow calls Hunt "notorious" and "the blacking-maker", and describes him as "a large, powerfully made fellow, who might have been taken for a butcher." There was no actual riot on this occasion, in contrast to what happened at a similar event in St Peter's Fields, Manchester, three years later.

Gronow concludes his account with an epilogue.

Several years after this event, at the time of the Reform Bill, Hunt was elected Member of Parliament for Preston... and I was elected for the immaculate borough of Stafford. I well recollect - but cannot describe - the amazement of the blacking-man when I told him one evening, in the smoking room of the House of Commons, that if any attack had been made upon the prison at Spa Fields, I had given my men orders to pick off Major Cartwright, himself, and one or two more who were in the cart. Hunt was perfectly astonished. He became very red and his eyes seemed to flash fire: 'What, sir! do you mean to say you would have been capable of such an act of barbarity?' 'Yes,' said I, 'and I almost regret you did not give us the opportunity, for your aim that day was to create a revolution and you would have richly deserved the fate which you so narrowly escaped by the cowardice or lukewarmness of your followers.'

Hunt had been at Peterloo (he is the figure in the centre of the stage, holding a white hat, in the picture below). He is unlikely to have been impressed by Gronow's posturing.

Regency Recollections, Captain Gronow's Guide to Life in London and Paris edited by Christopher Summerville, Ravenhall Books, 2006. £16-99

Technorati Tags: book+review, regency

2006-07-25T21:42:00.000+01:00

Well, the Crime Writers' Association narrowly lost their first round match in University Challenge - the Professionals to a team from Prospect Magazine by 170 points to 180. But with only five first round matches it turned out that they had just done well enough to qualify for tonight's first semifinal, where they faced the impressive looking team from The Bodleian Library.

Sadly it was no real contest. The Bod started well and stayed the course, running out the eventual winners by 295 points to 70. I reckon that they will be a difficult side for either Prospect Magazine or the Royal Statistical Society (who contest the second semifinal next Monday) to beat.

But I do hope that this is the start of a new trend. What literary festival wouldn't be livened up by a general knowledge quiz contested between genres, or publishers? How would a team of Virago authors do against a team from Viking? Would writers of science text books hold their own against poets?

Come on Rosie Boycott - you led a team from the Hay Festival on University Challenge last year - why not host an event yourself? Perhaps Penguin could put up a team including the editor of Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life.

And if any publisher wants to boost their chances by having me on their team, you know where to find my agent...

Technorati Tags: University+Challenge

2006-07-23T17:27:00.000+01:00

Another enjoyable talk at the RNA Conference in Penrith was Rachel Summerson's (she writes as Elizabeth Hawksley but has no webpage to link to) on what a villain can do for your story.

Rachel/Elizabeth has written some good villains herself, most notably the evil Mr Balquidder in Frost Fair, but for her talk she focused on the villains in Jane Austen, and in particular on Mr Wickham.

Wickham serves a very valuable narrative purpose, and one which only villains (with or with moustachios to twirl) can really achieve, which is to cast light on other characters (in this case primarily Darcy) from a different angle, and thus give them additional depth. Rachel pointed out that when Wickham appears, we do not know that he is a villain at all. We (and the character with whom we probably most empathise with, Lizzie) therefore take his opinions on Darcy at face value, or at least as being as valid as any other, until we learn the truth about our informant.

Whether we ever learn the whole truth about Wickham is a matter for speculation - something that Paperback Writer has been indulging in today.

But the point is that because we have seen Darcy through Wickham's eyes, as well as through those of his friends, we have a much more rounded view of him than we would if Wickham had never existed, and that is achieved even without the latter's act of greatest villainy: running off with Lydia.

That event does, however, give Darcy a chance to prove himself by his deeds, as well as his words, and that is, of course, another function of villains; to throw obstacles into the course of true love that forms the main plot of any romance.

In real life I subscribe to Hanlon's Razor, which is most simply expressed as "never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity", but when it comes to fiction I much prefer things to go wrong through somebody's malevolence, rather than the Big Misunderstanding, or any other demonstration of the hero's or heroine's fundamental stupidity (we're supposed to identify with one or the other of these two - do we really want to think of ourselves as dim?)

It is not surprising therefore that I have villains in my books. However I do find villains who are villainous "just because" to be a bit irritating. I prefer my villains to have a reason for their villainy, and the more wicked they are, the more compelling a reason I need to believe it. I'll make an exception for fantasy, where the universe may well exist within some Manichean struggle between the dark and the light, good and evil, or law and chaos, but in fiction set in the real world I struggle to accept people - contemporary or historical, simply being bad by nature.

Technorati Tags: jane+austen, Writing, romantic+novelists+association

2006-07-16T20:18:00.000+01:00

There are quite a few general accounts of the RNA conference popping up across the blogosphere, so I will not duplicate them. Amanda Ashby's account is as good a place to start as any. Instead I will say a bit about a few of the individual sessions that I really enjoyed. I'll start with the one I found most valuable of all.

Jenny Haddon, Chairman of the RNA, and top-rated Mills & Boon author under her pen name of Sophie Weston, gave a talk on Sunday called What do you mean, it needs more emotion?

The suggestion that our writing lacks that critical emotional punch is one that most writers have heard at one time or another. I certainly have. The first reaction to this has to be "does the person saying it know what they are talking about?"

Jenny suggested that they don't always. Emotional reaction to writing is a very personal thing, and your friends and critique partners may not always be the best judge of something like this. On the other hand the professionals out there - agents and editors - probably do know what they are talking about, and since they guard the portals of publication, it is always well worth listening to them.

However, while these people can point out the problem, they cannot fix it. Nobody can but you. So where do you start?

One place to look is your cast of characters. Perhaps the critical reader doesn't care enough about one of the key characters - the hero or the heroine. The first question to ask yourself is whether you care about them. Really. You love your plot, you love your hero, but when you look into your heroine's eyes you see what?

It was when my agent pointed out that nowhere in Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth was there any physical description of Miss Charlotte Hopesay that I realised that she hadn't properly come alive for me. I thought that I could see her through Lord Alexander's eyes, but it turned out that all I could see was him seeing her. I could barely see him through her eyes, and still less could I see what she thought about herself.

Faced with this dilemma, Jenny suggested going for a walk, to think about the problem character. Do you care about him or her? If so, what do you care about, and are you sure that you have said anything about it? If not, then maybe you should find somebody you do care about.

As it happens I had done just that. I'd found a surrogate Charlotte, I'd listened to her voice, and I had breathed life and emotion into her as I redrafted.

If you think that you do care, it's worth checking to see where in the story you say so. If you go through the draft highlighting every statement that shows you care, where are the highlighted bits? If there aren't plenty of them in the first fifty pages, then perhaps you should shuffle things around until there are.

Of course, your character has to be realistic and rounded. Even if you care about a perfect paragon of virtue others may find him or her unbelieveable. Jenny suggested looking at the flipsides of your characters' strengths. If they are energetic, perhaps they can be impatient. If they are kind perhaps they are weakwilled. If they are loyal maybe they are blind.

Of course there may not be time to pack all this characterisation into dialogue in the first few chapters. Jenny suggested that we should not be afraid to do a bit of telling, rather than relying on showing. But she made it clear that it must be simple telling, not diagnosis. By this, I believe that she meant that we can give our characters' backstories in the form of potted biographies, setting out the experiences that made them what they are now, but we must not say that they are this way because of that event. That would be interfering with the way our readers learn to love our characters.

While we can tell our readers what the characters are feeling, it is fatal to attempt to tell them what they should be feeling.

It's not always the characters that are the problem. It may be a matter of pace. I am certainly not going to try and explain how pace works, but I did recognise Jenny's suggestion that we have to take our readers through the story at the right speed. If we don't start writing until we know our stories really well, we may forget to take the reader through all the steps of the journey. This forces them to make assumptions, and they may make the wrong ones.

This was not a major problem for most of Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth, as I did not have a clue what was going to happen next, but when I was a little over halfway through I jumped to the end, to ensure that I knew how all the threads tied up, before filling in the bit before the end. Sure enough, it was the part of the story where I was joining things up that my agent said lacked sufficient punch. This was the bit where I knew where everything was going, but my reader didn't.

There was more, much more than this in Jenny's talk, but this post is already quite long enough. If you want to learn these secrets then rather than reading Wenlock, you need to join the RNA and come along to the conference. Next year we are back at Leicester University.

Technorati Tags: romantic+novelists+association

2006-07-10T21:25:00.000+01:00

Wenlock is almost a year old. I was reminded of this by the reappearance on the television of University Challenge: the Professionals. Tonight's opener pitted the Bodleian Library against the Society of Antiquaries of London.

The team from the Bodleian felt that they had a point to prove, as the 2004 series had been won by their bitter rivals at the British Library, who had, to add insult to injury, beaten the Bod's near neighbours, the Oxford University Press (in fact a team all from the Oxford English Dictionary) in the final. Winning by 190 points to 80, the Bodleian are, probably, on track to get through to the semifinals.

Next Monday will see another organisation enter the lists with a point to prove. The Crime Writers' Association will be following in the footsteps of the Romantic Novelists' Association last year. It is a bold move on their part.

Should they fail to make it all the way through to the final, they may have to endure comments along the lines of "crime writers aren't as smart as romantic novelists". Should this come to pass, however, I'm sure that it would be character-building.

I certainly wish the CWA the best of luck, and I hope that they do well. But not too well.

Technorati Tags: University+Challenge, Romantic+Novelists+Association

2006-07-10T21:09:00.000+01:00

Almost three weeks since I last posted. This really isn't good enough.

The last few weekends have seen a fair amount of upheaval at Wenlock Chase, with my books and computer coming down from the spare bedroom to the downstairs library, and Mrs Wenlock's books and computer going in the other direction.

I have been trying to turn the chaos to advantage by taking the opportunity to catalogue all my books on Library Thing. I suspect that I am not the only thingabrarian to pause at a fairly early stage in the cataloguing process with only the first chunk of books done. I am almost certainly not the only one to start at the beginning of the alphabet. This tendency might go some way to explaining why, in an author cloud dominated by writers of SF, one of the biggest names (literally) is Jane Austen.

My own collection, as far as it has been catalogued, can be seen as a cloud, or in full.

On top of all this cataloguing activity I have been away at the Romantic Novelists' Association's Annual Conference, which took place this year just outside Penrith, on the edge of the Lake District. I'll say some more about all that in a later post.

2006-06-21T22:13:00.000+01:00

Beau Brummell: This Charming Man (BBC4)

I really enjoyed the BBC's 80 minute drama based on Ian Kelly's excellent biography of Beau Brummell. The title role was played by James Purefoy, seen recently playing Mark Anthony in the HBO/BBC miniseries Rome, and as the Black Prince in A Knight's Tale. He has previous Regency form too, having played Tom Bertram in the BBC Mansfield Park from 1999. Here he came across as cool and devilishly handsome, but deeply insecure.

It would have been impossible to have fitted everything contained in Ian Kelly's book into such a short space of time, so the writer went for something of an impressionistic approach. We learn nothing of Brummell's origins, except that he came from nowhere.

How he came to gain the intimate friendship of the Prince of Wales (superbly played by Hugh Bonneville, another Mansfield Park alumnus) is not addressed (Brummell served in Prinny's regiment, the 10th Light Dragoons). We are instead taken straight to the Prince's plans for his wedding (there is a Realplayer video clip of this on the BBC4 website), and Brummell's advice that "less is more", as far as fashion is concerned.

The screenwriter, Simon Bent, has simplified aspects of Brummell's life are simplified for the benefit of the dramatic flow.

For example his valet, Robinson, (played by Phil Daniels) stays with the Beau through the story until his final ruin. The real Robinson served Brummell for ten years before moving on, to be replaced by a succession of others. This was a drama and not a documentary. It was true to the underlying course of events, if not to every detail.

We had many of the most well known Brummell anecdotes depicted: the audience who came to watch him dress; the incident with the Prince and the snuffbox; and the infamous "who's your fat friend?" quip that went so horribly wrong. We also had Lord Byron (Matthew Rhys).
Kelly speculates about a possible homosexual relationship between Brummell and Byron, but seems to come down against it having happened. Bent uses an ill-defined three-way relationship between Brummell, Byron, and Brummell's childhood sweetheart and, later, leading courtesan, Julia Storer/Johnstone (played by Zoe Telford) as the reason for Brummell's falling out with the Prince. Byron gets to deliver his famous remark that the three great men of the age are himself, Napoleon, and Brummell when they first meet. In fact Byron made the remark much later, when all three were exiled from their homelands.

The story ends with Brummell's flight to France on Thursday 16 May 1816, We are not shown his subsequent decay into squalor and syphilitic insanity, although Kelly details this in his book.

So what might Ian Kelly have made of this adaptation. It is pretty clear that he approved, for he took part in it, playing Lord Robert Manners, a member of the Dandaical Body. In the programme he appears as the voice of caution, seeking (but failing) to prevent his brother entering a joint loan agreement with Brummell and the Marquess of Worcester as the end loomed. In fact Manners entered into at least one such arrangement himself, but both he and his brother Charles (Nicholas Rowe) were comfortably bankrolled by their brother, the Duke of Rutland. When the crash came, they survived, but Brummell, who had come from nowhere, returned there at the last.

I expect that the programme will be repeated on BBC2 in due course. Well worth watching out for.

2006-06-17T11:16:00.000+01:00

With Mostly Books moving ever closer to their 1 July launch, I have been thinking about my own book-buying habits. I live in a town that is blessed with branches of two of the big bookshop chains, Ottakar's and Waterstones (one will no doubt disappear once the Wottakars merger goes through). We also have a large W H Smiths, and several smaller independents. So why do I actually buy most of my books from a certain online behemoth?

I lived in the US for several years a few years ago. We lived then within a short distance of both a huge Borders and a huge Barnes & Noble (there were no indepents particularly close to us). I found myself buying most of my books from those two, rather than from the American online behemoth. Why the difference?

It's not a matter of price. I am fortunate to have a well-paying job, and I can afford to pay full price for books if there are good reasons for doing so. I see 2-for-3 offers as an excuse to pick up a book I might not otherwise read, if there are two that I actually want. Buying online in the US would have been a cheaper, but I didn't do it.

I think that it is in part to do with where and when I learn about books that I might want to read. My main sources, apart from personal recommendations, are the Review section of theguardian on Saturdays, the Arts and Books section of the Independent on Fridays, the London Review of Books (alternate Fridays), and Open Book on Sundays on Radio 4 (when it's not being to up itself about popular fiction). What these have in common is that they appear at the weekend. What with all the other things that have to be fitted in to the weekend, I find myself deciding what books I would really like to get hold of on Sunday afternoons.

Now I tend to be a bit of an impulsive shopper. If I decide that I want something, then I want it now, or as close as possible to now. If I put an order in to Amazon on Sunday evening I will usually get a package through the door just before I go to work on Tuesday, and can look forward to reading the contents that evening.

If I decide to go the bricks and mortar route it takes much longer. Because I work normal office hours, and I am a little too far from the middle of town than makes a lunchtime trip convenient (I cycle to work, so would have to cycle into town and back), I can only get to the local Ottakars in the evenings or at the weekends. Except that they close at 6:00pm, and I can't always get there by then, and even if I can, having entered the shop I don't want to be rushed. Which means that I can only get in there at the weekends.

Back in the US the bookstores stayed open until 10:00 or 11:00pm, so I could go almost whenever the urge took me. Add to that the coffee and buns, and I could go, buy, and read a few chapters in quiet comfort.

So, Nicki and Mark, if I lived in Abingdon, the best way to get me to buy all my books from you would be to open in the evenings. Given all the demands on you as you start up, I rather suspect that you didn't want to hear that...

I must just add that my first thought on seeing the photograph of the future Mostly Books (at the top of this post), my first thought was that it looked just like a bookshop. A particular bookshop in fact. Black Books. I look forward to seeing how far the resemblance extends on the inside.

2006-06-02T20:45:00.000+01:00

I have been trying to come up with a good reason to blog about Smoke, apart from the fact that it is a wonderful quarterly magazine that deserves to be read widely - particularly by anybody who loves or hates London, or does not know it well enough to form an opinion. Subtitled "a London Peculiar" and describing itself as "words, photos and graphic art inspired by the City", Smoke is a labour of love by South Londoner Matt Haynes, and North Londoner (by adoption at least - I believe that underneath she is actually of the Welsh persuasion) Jude Rogers. It appears roughly quarterly, and issue number 8 was waiting for me on my return from Llangollen (of which more later).

Each edition (I have all except, tragically, the very first one) contains a wonderfully unpredictable mixture of essays, black and white photographs, and a number of ongoing series of microfeatures on aspects of London. Some of these are long running: we are up to number 7 in the series on London's campest statues (outside Pemberton House in EC4), while others start off well but disappear without trace shortly afterwards: I don't think we got past the first of Areas of London that rhyme with bits of a full English breakfast (Osidge, in Barnet).

So why do I think it appropriate to plug this excellent organ now? It's not that I have a piece in the next edition (although I am certinly thinking of writing something for Matt ~~and Jude~~* to consider. It's just that they have just started a new series of microfeatures on a subject close to the heart of this blog. London Elephants started in issue 7 with that thing in the middle of Wandsworth Bridge roundabout. This issue we have the Stratford rhubarb (as pictured). These are elephants in the sense of elephants in the room - "things that are so hugely and mind-bogglingly inexplicable that, somehow, they don't register".

So now you know. Do go and subscribe. If you have an opinion on the greatest city the world has ever known, then Smoke will support or challenge it. If you don't, then Smoke will give you a great chance to form one.

* It looks as if Jude is moving on. Good luck to her, and even more to Matt, left to produce issue 9 on his own.

2006-06-02T16:54:00.000+01:00

Heyeroines in need of a slap

24. Kate Malvern (Cousin Kate)

Miss Malvern, if we are to believe her own account of her upbringing, is a resourceful woman. Years spent in the Peninsula, following her father, has inured her to physical hardship and social deprivation. No English home can be so cold, or draughty, no bed so hard or ill-made that she has not experienced far worse in Spain or Portugal. No English company can be so rude, so strange, so unnatural, that she has not already met its equal among the men of Wellington's army, or the local peasantry. To Miss Malvern nothing can crop up that cannot be dealt with by the correct application of wit and aplomb.

So, having lost her position as a governess as a result of some or other misunderstanding (and, out of the common courtesy for which these essays are so renowned, we will not go there) it is only to be expected that Miss Malvern will not merely settle down comfortably, but find plenty to occupy and amuse her mind, whether she were to find herself in a converted coach-house now being used to house her old nurse's new family, or in an elaborately landscaped estate situated in the very vague vicinity of, say, Market Harborough.

But, when she finds herself at Staplewood, the very epitome of a landscaped estate in the very vague vicinity of Market Harborough, what does she do? Nothing.

When she discovers that her apparently loving aunt is in fact a swivel-eyed harridan who is intercepting her letters, does she come up with a brilliant stratagem for thwarting her evil plans, or does she just mope around doing nothing?

When she discovers that her impossibly beautiful cousin is a couple of tassels short of a pair of Hessians, and prefers biting the heads off dead rabbits than playing billiards does she come up with a scheme to have him removed to a place of safety, or does she just sit and fret and do nothing?

When she discovers that the household servants are embroiled in a dispute among themselves more complex than the War of the Austrian Succession, and that the housekeeper is given to prophecy while the cook is a totally unclichéd histrionic Frenchman and her cousin's manservant is apparently a badger, does she come up with a way of escaping to Market Harborough and taking the stage coach to London, or does she potter around the garden cutting flowers and achieving nothing?

When her other cousin, the not-quite-so-beautiful but somewhat-more-sane one, makes a rather implausible offer of marriage does she decide that enough is more than enough, or does she put off responding and instead choose to do nothing?

When the frankly scary aunt insists that Miss Malvern must marry her mad-as-a-fruitbat cousin to maintain a family tradition that nobody else is even aware of, or else face a lifetime of drudgery despite her somewhat underplayed skill as a modiste, does she stand up to her with vigour, or does she duck the whole subject and instead do nothing?

When the quite-a-long-way-to-the-east-of-Barking cousin finally goes over the top and strangles the dangerously-obsessed aunt with his bare hands before drowning himself rather beautifully in the lake, does Miss Malvern consider that there is nothing in the world that would make her marry anyone remotely connected to that side of the family, or does she decide to go ahead and accept an offer from a close relative of the deranged and departed whom she has known, when you count it up, barely more than a week?

Would a slap actually do any good, or should somebody wheel out the cluestick?

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2006-05-26T00:47:00.000+01:00

This will be my last post for a while. Mrs Wenlock is driving me into the mountain fastnesses of Wales today, and leaving me in a remote cottage with no access to telephone, television or the interweb thingy so that I can have a week of solitude in which to write a good chunk of my new novel, an as yet untitled sequel to Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth. As I have said in a previous post, this will have an Arthurian theme of sorts, although it takes place in 1814.

My cottage was chosen for its remoteness - it is a good few miles from the nearest pub, for instance - but it turns out that the nearest town, Llangollen, claims Arthurian connections for itself. Indeed the hill in the picture below is called Craig Arthur, and nearby is Croes Gwenhwyfar, said to be the only place in Britain named after Guinevere. I should add that the earliest record of the name is from 1690, and was recorded by Edward Lhuyd, the inventor of Celticism, so it probably does not stand much scrutiny.

Sarah was in Llangollen quite recently, and one of the comments on her post reminds me that it is not far from where the action of some of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence takes place. I have nearly finished reading the last of the series to the Wenlock heir at bedtime.

Look for me to post again next Sunday.

2006-05-26T00:08:00.000+01:00

One of the highest hurdles for any unpublished author to overcome is finding an agent. I know that I have been incredibly fortunate to be taken on by the first agency that I approached, and also to have such an excellent working relationship with them. Of course we have not got as far as securing a publishing contract, but their record speaks for itself: if Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth does not find a publisher it won't be because Ampersand aren't any good.

Not everybody is so lucky, and many aspiring writers are desperate to find an agent. So desperate that they are at risk of falling for scams. This seems to be a bigger problem in the US than over here, but the US is also where you will find operations like Writer Beware which exist to expose such scam-merchants for what they are.

Of course not all scammers are happy with the exposure that they get on websites like Writer Beware's Twenty Worst Agents list. One agent on this list, Barbara Bauer, has even started making legal threats against websites that highlight her place on that list. This has sometimes worked, but more often stirred up further negative publicity.

In addition to the Writer Beware list, there is also the venerable Preditors and Editors, who can be relied upon to draw attention to scammers (see what they say about Barbara Bauer). And for those of you looking for the personal touch, a post like this would not be complete without a reference to Gerard Jones and his snappily titled site, Everyone Who's Anyone in Adult Trade Publishing, Propagandaville and Tinseltown, Too, is a Worthless, Superfluous, Giddy, Giggly, Chickenhearted, Money-Grubbing Nazi Moron.

2006-05-23T19:33:00.000+01:00

Back in April I noted that Wenlock Books had been shortlisted for Independent Bookseller of the Year at the British Book Trade Awards. Well, they won.

The bookshop (with which I have no connection other than in the name) has been getting quite a lot of good press recently. I see that theguardian used the groanworthy headline "Much ado about Wenlock" for an article about them back in March. They are also featured in yesterday's piece on independent bookshops that are bucking the trend of discounting and closure that has been too much in the news over the last few weeks.

That feature should be cheering news also for Mark and Nicki at Mostly Books, coming soon to Abingdon.

2006-05-22T18:04:00.000+01:00

Back in 1995 the BBC recorded dramatisations of two of Georgette Heyer's novels for the Radio 4 Playhouse slot - 90 minute single dramas. One of those two, Friday's Child, was rebroadcast by BBC7 at the weekend, and is available on their Listen Again service until next Friday.

The production stars Elli Garnett as Hero Wantage, and James Frain (Paul Raines in series 4 of 24) as Sherry. There are a few well-known names among the minor characters. Simon Russell Beale (a brilliant Shakespearean actor whom I saw a few years back as Richard III) plays Mr Tarleton, the late Mary Wimbush (Julia Pargeter to fans of The Archers) plays Lady Saltash and Julian Rhind-Tutt (Dr "Mac" Macartney from Green Wing) plays Ferdy Fakenham brilliantly.

All in all, well worth 90 minutes of your time.

The other Playhouse production from 1995 was Faro's Daughter. I do not know whether this has been rebroadcast, or will be soon. It stars Sylvestra Le Touzel (Fanny Price from the 1983 BBC Mansfield Park) and Nathaniel Parker (Harold Skimpole in the recent BBC Bleak House) as Deb Grantham and Max Ravenscar. The BBC also recorded Regency Buck in 1986, with Elizabeth Proud as Judith Taverner, and Steve Hodson as Lord Worth. Going back even further, to 1974, they recorded The Toll Gate, but I do not know who played what part in that.

Sadly Radio 4 no longer supports a slot for 90 minute dramas. The World Service has moved away from any sort of drama, and BBC7 commissions almost nothing new. That leaves only Radio 3 in a position to broadcast any further full-length productions like these. I fear that we will wait a long time before any more of Heyer's books are adapted for the radio in this way.

2006-05-18T17:10:00.000+01:00

Readers with a retentive memory may recall that, back in January, I decided to change Lord Alexander's surname, because "Hawkshead" was too close to "Hawkwood", the surname of the hero of James McGee's Ratcatcher, a book which appeared to have a number of features in common with Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth. At that time I decided not to read McGee's book, so that I wasn't influenced by it.

Now that I am at the dotting of Ts and crossing of eyes stage of redrafting, I decided that it was safe to give Ratcatcher a go. I finished reading it this morning, on the coach up to London (National Express rather than the Mail, but at least I was guaranteed a seat inside).

Good news on two fronts. The first is that while there are elements in common between the two books - French spies, English aristocrats, a plot against the Prince, and much drinking of Brandy - these are standard features of books set in the early 19th Century, and there are no egregious similarities. The two are quite different in terms both of plot and tone. Bow Street Runner Matthew Hawkwood is at home in that part of London East of St Martin's Lane, while Lord Alexander Harrow, youngest son of the Duke of Derwent, prefers it West of the Lane - not that each does not cope in the other's natural territory when necessary. Hawkwood would probably be able to handle an elephant too, but I was relieved to discover that he was not called upon to do so.

Not surprisingly McGee's book is darker than mine: there is more violence, and less romance. In the territory that stretches between and around the two poles of Bernard Cornwell and Georgette Heyer, McGee is closer to the former while I am, if it is not presumptious to claim so, nearer to the latter.

The other good news is that Ratcatcher is well written, well researched, and was fun to read. It is, I believe, intended as the first of a series. I hope that this proves true.

2006-05-14T15:37:00.000+01:00

Two newpaper articles have caught my attention in the last couple of days.

The first is a piece by Sara Fitzgerald in the Washington Post titled "Romance, Writ Large - A Tried-and-True Genre Of Novels Expands, And Business Is Booming". It is an account of the Washington Romance Writers' annual retreat at Harper's Ferry (pictured above). It gives a reasonable overview of the state of Romance in the US, but what struck me - indeed what struck the Colonial correspondent who alerted me to the item - was a mention of how one author found her way into the Regency period:

Kathryn Caskie was a former marketing executive in AOL's financial content area when she found her voice writing witty Regencys, a sub-genre of books set in the England of 1811-1820, the era of Jane Austen. The Waterford, Va., author had come close to getting a "Scottish Medieval" historical romance published when she had a brainstorm while watching trailers for the movie Rules of Engagement. "What if two old ladies found a war manual and mistook it for a manual on how to get engaged?" That led to her own Rules of Engagement, published by Warner Books' Warner Forever imprint. That was followed by another Regency, Lady in Waiting, about a lady's maid who has a shopping addiction.

The Scottish Medieval historical, she says, remains in a drawer. "People don't want angsty Medievals from me, they want to have fun. That's my audience."

Kathryn Caskie is not the only writer with a Mediaeval historical tucked away in a drawer. Two of my earliest attempts at writing were set in the Mediaeval period: one recasting Æthelred II (known as Unræd, "ill-advised" or, wrongly, "unready") as the heroic but tragic figure he really was; the other telling the extraordinary story of Judith, daughter of the Carolingian King Charles the Bald. Kaskie says that readers don't want angsty Mediaevals from her. I never got far enough to know whether they might want them from me: it was enough for me to establish that while I wanted the stories told, I wasn't enjoying trying to tell them. Maybe one day.

The other article is from the Scottish Sunday Times. "The Write Way to Fall in Love" by Kenny Farquharson describes a recent Romance writing course given by Sharon Kendrick at the Castle of Park. It was a course at the Castle of Park, given by Annie Burgh, which pointed me at the Romantic Novelists' Association. Joining the RNA was probably the single best move in my (as yet still short) writing career. Mr Farquharson cannot resist the usual inaccurate pastiche of Mills & Boon style at the start of his piece, but once past that he gives a better than average account of the course.

Taking a lunchtime break in the sunshine on the Castle of Park lawns, Kendrick explains that the writing of the perfect Mills & Boon is partly instinct and partly an awareness of unwritten rules...

...To succeed in this trade, she says, writers cannot be cynical hacks out to make a killing from women’s simple desires, but must have "a fundamental belief in the redeeming power of love". As for the archetypes and sexual stereotypes that people the books, she is unapologetic....

..."These books are fantasy and they end with the resolution of the romance, which is exactly where Pride and Prejudice ends. We do not hear about what Mr Darcy is saying to his wife 10 years down the line. Instead of calling her ‘my darling Lizzie’ in that quietly passionate way and loving her feisty spirit, he might think she’s an argumentative cow."

This is better certainly than the piece on the same course by Martyn McLaughlin in yesterday's Glasgow Herald (not available on-line). I have only seen the opening paragraph, but McLaughlin manages to squeeze in enough inaccurate, insulting and patronising clichés there to put me off wanting to read anything else by him.

2006-05-06T12:57:00.000+01:00

What is a Romantic Novel? The latest issue of the Romantic Novelists' Association's RNA News contains two essays on this subject, from RNA Chairman Jenny Haddon, and from RNA President Diane Pearson.

Jenny is clear that "romantic" is a slippery word. If it means everything that Roget's Thesaurus suggests as synonyms it would cover almost every novel ever written, from Gilgamesh and Genji to Trainspotting. This is clearly too wide a definition for any practical purpose so Jenny suggests a narrower definition:

My own view is that a romantic novel is about:
an adult love affair
the risks and powers of emotions, particularly sexual attraction
personal ethics

She goes on to make it clear that a romantic novel may include many other things, including big ideas or simple passion, but the core must be "conflicts between sense of self, what the characters want and how that changes under the onslaught of attraction and eventually, need for beloved's good above all things."

Diane takes a different approach.

I have always felt that our title [the Romantic Novelists' Association] is more of a generic heading covering an enormous range of popular fiction written very largely (though by no means entirely) by women, for women - romance, serious historicals, chic-lit, sagas, comedies, aga-sagas, romantic suspense and so on.

She suggests that "the true romantic novel should be huge in every sense of the word and at its core should be an overwhelming, gut-wrenching, heart-pulling, passionate emotion."

Diane argues that the emotional content does not necessarily have to be that of love between a man and a woman. She suggests that the biggest love in Scarlett O'Hara's life is not for Rhett or Ashley, but for Tara. She also quotes Douglas Reeman (Alexander Kent) saying that he considers his own work to be very romantic "What can be more romantic than a man's passion for his ship and the sea?"

For Jenny the bottom line is:

no love story, no romantic credentials.

Diane says:

They're hard to write and require stamina and courage, but when they work - Wow! - they're the most powerful and memorable books ever written."

So how does Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth stand up against these two definitions? It passes Jenny's first hurdle: there is a love story there. Moreover, our hero ultimately risks his very life for our heroine.

As to Diane's requirements: there is indeed, at the book's core, something huge. Gut-wrenching, heart-pulling emotion, yes of course. But more, much more than this, there is an elephant.

2006-05-01T16:15:00.000+01:00

Sumer is icomen in,
Lhude sing cuccu.
Groweth sed and bloweth med
And springth the wude nu.
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteth after lomb
Lhouth after calve cu:
Bulluc sterteth
bucke verteth,
Murie sing cuccu!

Today is May Day, traditionally the first day of Summer in England. OK, so there have been enough attempts to mess about with the traditional seasons, not to mention the events of September 1752, to make it impossible to say definitively when anything should happen "traditionally", but it seems to me that the period between May Day and Lammas works better as Summer than any other three month period.

Traditional (there's that word again) English summer holidays - going to the beach in August with a bucket and spade - are a very modern phenomenon, coming along during and after the Industrial Revolution. Before industrialisation the start of August marked the end of Summer, and the start of the harvest - the busiest time of the year.

Summer was a period of long, lazy days when the countryside was at its most green and pleasant, building up from the celebrations of May Day to Midsummer's Day, and then drifting peacefully towards Lammastide.

If there’s a bustle in your hedgerow
Don’t be alarmed now,
It’s just a spring clean for the may queen.
Yes, there are two paths you can go by
But in the long run
There’s still time to change the road you’re on.
And it makes me wonder.

The days are long now, and the old traditions still survive if you know where to look for them. These are the best three months of the year.

2006-04-28T17:26:00.000+01:00

Pride and Prejudice is officially an Icon of England. It was one of 21 new icons added yesterday to the 12 original selections announced in January.

There are now six books which have been accorded icon status. The other five are the Authorised Version of the Bible, Alice in Wonderland, The Lindisfarne Gospels, On the Origin of Species and Domesday Book. These last three were also added yesterday. (Brick Lane is on the list, but I suspect that they mean the street rather than the novel).

What is slightly surprising is that the works of Shakespeare have not made it on to the list (although the Globe Theatre has). Nor has anything by Dickens, although that may be because there is no single Dickens novel that stands far enough above the rest in public esteem the way that Pride and Prejudice does among Jane Austen's works.

I am tempted to nominate the Regency Period as an icon in its own right (I have already put in a nomination for The Archers). At present the early 19th Century is represented by P&P and by HMS Victory, so it may be pushing things to have an eleven year slice of history on top.

In any case I should be husbanding my resources for a more important icon. If we are going to celebrate Stonehenge, Big Ben and the Angel of the North as English icons, then surely we should also include that other giant emblem of Englishness, the Elephant.

2006-04-23T15:02:00.000+01:00

Heyeroines in need of a slap

23. Elinor Rochdale (The Reluctant Widow)

As the creator of the Bridekirk Behemoth, I might be expected to have some sympathy for Miss Rochdale, since one of her most prominent features (mentioned three times in the first two pages) is a trunk. Sadly it quickly transpires that hers is not that sort of trunk, and indeed the more we learn of Miss Rochdale, the less like an elephant she turns out to be.

Firstly there is the matter of her taste in food. While elephants are known for a predeliction for buns (and, if Dr Johnson's Dictionary is to be believed, for pulses of all sorts), Miss Rochdale seems to eat nothing but bread-and-butter. She has this for dinner on her first arrival at Highnoons, and again for breakfast next morning at the Hall. When trapped in the book-room the next day with Master Nicky's dog bouncer, what does she request from Mrs Barrow but bread-and-butter.

Then there is the worrying lack of feathers. Not only does she arrive in Billingshurst without one in her hat, but she then marries Eustace Cheviot. Now of course we know that the magic feather was just a prop, a device to build up confidence, but at this early stage Miss Rochdale would surely have been better off with a bit more confidence. It must therefore be an unwise move for anyone with asirations of an elephantine sort to join herself to a man like Mr Cheviot who, in contrast to Mr Timothy Q Mouse, is well known for not having a feather to fly with.

What about that well-documented pachydermatous personality trait, curiosity? Again Miss Rochdale, or, as we must now style her, Mrs Cheviot, disappoints. On her first night at Highnoons she encounters a Frenchman wandering around indoors, despite the fact that all the doors and windows are locked, and that the side door, which he claims gave him access, does not even exist. Is she curious? Does she wonder what is going on? No. She simply goes to bed. She doesn't even ask the man his name. Presented the next day with a genuine secret passage, she refuses to enter it. I fear that our heyeroine can hardly be described as insatiable.

There comes a brief moment of hope about halfway through our tale, when the scutter of a mouse across the floor makes Mrs Cheviot jump nearly out of her skin - for elephants are notoriously scared of mice. Shortly afterwards Mrs Cheviot visits Chichester and comes back with a dress of grey muslin - about as elephantine a gown as one could hope for, particularly with the treble flounce.

This proves, however, to be a false dawn. Mrs Cheviot's diet continues strictly bun-free despite Miss Beccles eating macaroons, Lord Bedlington tucking into cakes and Mrs Barrow cooking up drop-cakes for Ned Carlyon and his brothers. It is the possibility of French spies, rather than the certain presence of mice that carries most weight in Mrs Cheviot's thinking when she considers whether to move out of Highnoons. Even the choice of grey clothing loses some of its impact when it emerges that the Honourable Francis Cheviot sports the same colour without any indication that he aspires to the elephant set.

We are ultimately forced to pack away Mrs Cheviot's trunk as a cruel delusion after the incident with the linen list. Mrs Cheviot is found semi-conscious on the floor. The inventory of linens prepared by Miss Beccles is scattered near the fireplace. Assorted Carlyons have arrived upon the scene, as has Dr Greenlaw. Lord Carlyon then asks Mrs Cheviot a very simple question. Before she lost consciousness, was the window of the book-room open? Mrs Cheviot replies that she has no recollection that it was. No recollection. Her very words.

I suspect that you have seen where I am going with this. No amount of curiosity over what Francis Cheviot wanted with the clock can any longer be persuasive. Nor can Mrs Cheviot's sudden predeliction for macaroons. Her determination to wear grey while still in strict mourning cannot be more than custom and practice. Even her decision to throw her lot in with the three ring circus of the extended Carlyon menagerie is insufficient. Nothing that Mrs Cheviot could say or do would allow us to consider her remotely like an elephant.

She may have been stunned by a paperweight, confused by the strangeness of her circumstances, placed under considerable stress by the activities of those around her. There are all manner of reasons that she might not have been at the top of her game, but the simple truth is unavoidable. Mrs Cheviot was asked a straightforward question, and answered that she could not recollect. Yet we all know that an elephant never forgets.

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2006-04-22T16:53:00.000+01:00

To the Savoy Hotel, for the awarding of the Fostergrant Reading Glasses Romantic Novel of the Year 2006. This is one of the high points of the romantic novelists' year, and tends to involve more seriously heavy drinking than either the RNA Summer or Winter Parties (but not as much as the Annual Conference, but then that lasts for several days).

Published authors usually have their publishers buy them tickets, and they sit surrounded by their editors and other key players from the company. Those of us who pay for our own tickets can express a preference for whom we sit with, but in the end we are in the hands of the RNA committee, and in particular those of the indefatigable organiser of the event, RNA vice-Chairman Catherine Jones.

My luck was in. I actually ended up on Catherine's table, together with, among others, former short-listed author Linda Taylor, and two very pleasant people from Darley Anderson Literary Agency, Elizabeth Wright and Lucie Whitehouse.

The food was good. Asparagus with a cured lemon sauce (we did wonder what had been wrong with the lemon before it had been cured), loin of lamb (not quite as tender as the new season lamb from Stourhead that I cooked last Sunday but still yummy in a herb crust), and a dessert featuring thyme sorbet, which I loved, but others found a little too unusual.

The main business of the event was the awarding of the Fostergrant prize, complete with a cheque for £10,000. Five of the seven nominees were there at the savoy, the exceptions being Ashleigh Bingham, who lives in Australia (I believe that she is a little frail, and probably could not face the journey) and Nicholas Sparks. The winner was Erica James, for Gardens of Delight. She has been on the shortlist four times before. I was rooting for The Ship of Brides, by Jojo Moyes, not least because she has been known to read this blog. Jojo was sitting at the table next to mine, and was incredibly gracious about Erica James winning when I commiserated with her.

The Fostergrant isn't the only prize awarded at the Savoy. The RNA also awards a (smaller) prize for the best category romance of the year, and this went to Contracted: Corporate Wife, by Jessica Hart. I was hoping that it would win. I have to confess to having not actually read it (nor any of the other shortlisted books, I'm afraid), but what I liked about Contracted: Corporate Wife was the colon in the title. As regular readers may have noticed, I am all in favour of punctuation in book titles (apostrophes don't count), and titles with colons are thin on the ground (I note that the French takeover of Time Warner Book Group has been good for punctuation, as they have been renamed Little, Brown).

There were speeches as well as prizes. The chairman of the judges, Dr Susan Horsewood-Lee, did go on a bit, and to be honest was not a patch on last year's chairman, Danuta Keane (who wrote a rather depressing piece for Mslexia, which was reproduced in edited form in a recent edition of the Independent). Stanley Johnson, father of the more famous Boris, gave a rambling talk about not very much. Luckily there was still plenty of wine on the table so this did not eat into critical drinking time.

Then it was all over, and we made our way to the Coal Hole for the proper business of the day.

2006-04-16T23:07:00.000+01:00

I have just finished the rewrites for Anne-Marie. Tomorrow I will give the whole thing one final read to make sure that I haven't made some horrendous mistake, and if all is well it will be in the post to Ampersand on Tuesday.

At the start of this process Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth was 101,572 words long, spread over 11 chapters. It is now a trim 89,775 words, broken into 21 shorter, more pacy chapters.

But there is more than just an 11.6% reduction in length. In the course of revising LAC;o,tBB I have, I think, made the story more plausible, yet more exciting. I have made the heroine more real.

I have also corrected three significant continuity errors. I have amended more than a dozen cases where the wrong character is apparently in the scene. I have picked up seven cases of misdescribed relationships. I have corrected hundreds of more minor errors in grammar and spelling.

Looking back at what I sent to Ampersand in the first place I can only conclude that they were mad to sign me up when they did (but don't tell them that). I just hope that they now have a book that they can work with. It is certainly a much better book than it was at Christmas.

Now for the sequel. I have a month for research before I start writing it.

2006-04-15T10:41:00.000+01:00

The Wenlock family took a tour of Somerset yesterday, in pursuit of ideas for the sequel to Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth. Our first stop was at Glastonbury, where we climbed the Tor. Conditions were far from ideal; the tower loomed out of low clouds; it was real Marion Zimmer Bradley weather.

So what has this to do with the novel that, for quite a while, has carried the working title of Lady Cardington's Folly; or, the Limehouse Leviathan? My original idea was to have the story involve the Nautilus, or something like it. Unfortunately I was beaten to it by James McGee's Ratcatcher. But I now have a new idea, which features a somewhat deluded nobleman, the Earl of Avalon, who is incensed by Walter Scott's relocation of Arthurian legend to Scotland in The Lady of the Lake. The true Lake, he believes, is on his own estate.

A lake that looks something like our second destination, Stourhead. The Earl of Avalon's great house, with landscaped gardens, eyecatchers, follies, etc, is not, of course, going to be Stourhead itself, but is certainly inspired by it.

By the afternoon the mists and clouds had dispersed, and after touring the house, with its wonderful Regency library (a little too much of the rest of the house was restored to Edwardian grandeur following a bad fire in 1902), we walked around the lake, stopping off at the Grotto, the Temple of Apollo, the Gothic Cottage and the Pantheon.

My story is to be set in 1814, immediately after the defeat of Napoleon. The Earl invites our heroine, Miss Laeticia Leintwardine, to play the part of the Queen of Beauty (a part for which she is eminently qualified) in a great Arthurian pageant. Of course such an event attracts the interests of others, and neither the Earl's plans, nor the course of true love, will run entirely smooth.

There will be buckles swashed, and derring done, but also hearts lost and hearts won. How it all works out in the end I will only know when I have written it, but I hope that I will have some idea after my writing week in deepest darkest Wales at the end of May.

2006-04-11T21:34:00.000+01:00

The bookshop stands on a quiet street in an as yet unknown corner of Oxfordshire. We will call it Mostly Books because of the great number of books which make the surrounding shelves their home, and rest on the tables between cups of freshly-made coffee.

Mostly Books is due to open on 1 July. Nicki and Mark, who are setting it up, are blogging about their experiences in the run-up to the launch. Currently they are wondering what books to include in their first consignment of stock.

Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth won't quite be available on 1 July, at least, not this next 1 July, but Flora Thompson's wonderful Larkrise to Candleford (cruelly pastiched above) is a book that no Oxfordshire bookseller should be without.

With all the talk of the Wottakars merger, and the rise of Tesco as the biggest bookseller in the country, it is good to see bookselling on a more human scale. I wish them all the luck in the world.

2006-04-09T19:32:00.000+01:00

Miss Snark has announced the results of her writing competition and the overall winner is...

ME

I'm stunned.

2006-04-09T13:53:00.000+01:00

Heyeroines in need of a slap

22. Sarah Thane (The Talisman Ring)

When I first started this series of character ~~assassinations~~ studies I was conscious that one or two of my subjects would arouse particularly strong emotions among those who refuse to have any fault imputed to their particular idol. I suspect that Miss Thane is one such icon of heyeroinedom, so I should perhaps tread lightly. I should, but that doesn't mean that I shall. I will, however, attempt to be thorough. I will lay out the evidence, but it is for you to draw your own conclusions.

A careful study of Miss Thane's behaviour in chapter one of The Talisman Ring is not, it must be said, particularly illuminating. This is because she never shows. Nor does she feature in chapter 2 nor chapter 3. Once we get to chapter 4 we discover the reason for this. She has overslept and missed the start of the story. Laziness, or something more sinister? We shall return to that particular point later. For now I shall simply note that had the oh-so-sensible Miss Thane done the sensible thing, and been up and about in the early pages, Ludovic might not have been shot, and we would have escaped the worst of Mademoiselle de Vauban's histrionics. And yes, Eustacie may be a rather over-imaginative young woman, but at least she is professional enough to show up in the first chapter.

Having finally appeared, if not having bothered to get dressed, Miss Thane gives every impression of being one of those people who think that the best way to make up for being late is to talk and talk until we rather wish she hadn't made the effort after all. At the same time she wants to talk in such a variety of registers that we are astounded by her versatility. Within the first three pages she speaks "placidly", "imperturbably", "earnestly", "regretfully", "meekly" and "encouragingly". It is hardly surprising that there is a great scarcity of adverbs in contemporary dialogue tags with Miss Thane's liberal deployment of them here. At least we have a good idea what Heyer means by Miss Thane having "a generous mouth".

This is not the only aspect of Miss Thane's generosity that we become aware of. She is also very free with her hartshorn and her basilicum powder. Quite a travelling pharmacopeia is our Miss Thane. Now why should that be?

Heyer also describes Miss Thane as "sensible", and this is, I know, very much the perceived wisdom, but is she really sensible? The evidence points the other way, and does so even if one ignores her wilful encouraging of poor Mademoiselle de Vauban's morbid fascinations.

Let us take the critical topic of interior decoration. Miss Thane appears to be woefully ignorant on all aspects of cartouches, caryatids and scratch-mouldings, let alone strap-and-jewel work. She probably wouldn't recognise silver-figured oak wainscoating if you nailed it to the walls all around her. Such deficiencies are always regrettable, but can usually be disguised by the deployment of diversionary tactics - fainting fits, megrims, cornflower blue eyes, that sort of thing. Far from adopting such an approach, Miss Thane (grey eyes, but she could surely improvise) throws herself into an elaborate scheme whose success depends absolutely upon her having expertise in precisely this area. Is that sensible, or behaviour more to be expected from one under the influence of... but I get ahead of myself.

Let us instead consider Miss Thane's role in that critical scene where Ludovic is about to be discovered by Mr Stubbs, the Bow Street Runner. Except that she plays no role at all. She has gone out for a "sedate" walk with her brother. Of course I am not going to suggest that anybody read any significance into the word "sedate". Not at all. At least, not yet.

But while Miss Thane was off being "sedate", it was left to Ludovic Lavenham to improvise the obligatory cross-dressing masquerade scene without which no Heyer romance is really complete. He makes a reasonable enough fist of it, but nobody can deny that had Miss Thane been present it would have run more smoothly. Yet it is she who kicks up a fuss about the loss of her "French perfume". Sensible? I think not.

Nor is it sensible to wander about at night in the middle of February in the belief that one is being caressed by balmy breezes on the way to a romantic tryst with a man that she has frequently described as having not a romantic bone in his body. Not sensible, but possibly understandable if one ha been indulging in... but, let us see this through to the end.

The Talisman Ring ends with great excitement, following the discovery of the ring itself. Sir Tristram is rushing off to London on the Night-Mail. Eustacie is in a state of high excitement. Where is Miss Thane? She is walking in a "leisurely fashion". She is slipping into "empty-headed femininity". She is subsiding in an "inanimate heap on the floor", where she misses the actual capture of the villainous Beau Lavenham.

It is perhaps that name that gives us a clue as to what is really going on here. The whole adventure never happened. It was all taking place inside Miss Thane's head. Far from being a witty romantic adventure, The Talisman Ring is nothing more than the terrifying portryal of a vision in opium.

Not Lavenham but Laudanum? You must decide for yourselves.

Technorati Tags: heyeroines

2006-04-08T11:53:00.000+01:00

Last night I saw my heroine, Miss Charlotte Hopesay, in the flesh.

Well, not exactly. As I have mentioned, Miss Hopesay's physical appearance is inspired by Heather Findlay of progressive rockers Mostly Autumn. The band played last night in the Corn Hall in Cirencester, which is less than 20 miles from the Wenlock abode, so I went along. I managed to secure a place almost at the front, strictly for research purposes, of course.

Heroes and heroines in less well written romances appear to be able to identify the colour of each others' eyes at a glance across a crowded room. The light level of a typical Regency ballroom cannot have been significantly better than that of the Corn Hall last night, and I found it very difficult to determine the colour of Miss Findlay's eyes from twelve feet away. They were not cornflower blue, flashing green nor (because such things don't exist naturally) amethyst. They were not cool grey, nor an intense dark brown (this one does exist - my eyes are a very deep brown). My conclusion was that they are hazel, not least because there is no real consensus over what colour hazel actually is.

I didn't spend the whole evening staring into Miss Findlay's eyes, however. I also wanted to see how her face reflected emotions, and how she moved about. Being the lead singer in a rock band she managed to express a wide range of intense emotions: sorrow, happiness (even ecstasy), pain and anger. But she was not strutting the stage the whole time, and during breaks between songs, or during other bandmembers' solos, she showed gentler emotions: thoughtfulness, wistfulness, concern, even confusion.

I did less well, from a research point of view, when it came to watching Miss Findlay move. Unfortunately she had not chosen to wear a high-waisted, full-length evening dress in primrose silk, or even a walking dress of sprig muslin. Nor was her footwear - knee-length black leather and suede boots with 3 inch stiletto heels - quite in keeping with what Miss Hopesay would have worn to Lady Stretton's Salon, or as the everyday clothes of a gently-born governess-companion.

But you can't have everything. The music was great, even if I did get absolutely drenched biking home in the wind and rain. Maybe next time the band plays in this area I will be able to persuade Miss Findlay to wear something a little more Regency.

2006-04-08T11:40:00.000+01:00

Wenlock Books has been nominated for an award.

Nothing to do with me, or this blog, however. The Wenlock Books in question is a small bookshop in Much Wenlock which has been nominated for the National Book Trade Award for independent bookshop of the year (thanks to Galleycat for the tip-off).

While I was in Shropshire last May, writing a fair chunk of Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth (thanks for the suggestions for alternative titles - I still haven't hit on the perfect one quite yet), I visited Wenlock Books. They manage to cram a huge number of books into a very small space, and they tended to be books that I wanted to read, rather than the latest ghost-written celebrity autobiography.

I'd like to wish them the best of luck with the award, which will be announced on 9 May.

2006-04-03T22:22:00.000+01:00

Miss Snark gives her readers less than 24 hours to enter a writing competition, and gets over a hundred entries. That says something about the devotion of the snarklings. The offerings are being posted now, but it will probably take a week for them all to appear. They are going up in the order that they were submitted, and it looks as if the quality is improving as people took longer to draft and redraft. Yet even in the 18 that I have seen so far there are a few really cracking efforts. It will be interesting to see how mine fares at the hands of the snarkling commentariat.

Of course I shouldn't have entered; I should have used the time to push on with the rewrites. I also have the tricky business of coming up with a better title. Anne-Marie is happy with the Bridekirk Behemoth, but feels that Lord Alexander's Cipher isn't quite right, as he neither creates nor breaks the cipher in question. The trouble is, having lived with LAC;o,tBB for so long it is hard to get my head round any alternatives. I shall take advice at the RNA Oxford Chapter lunch tomorrow.

I am, as ever, open to suggestions from my dear readers too.

2006-04-02T19:31:00.000+01:00

The indefatigable Miss Snark is holding a competition. If you are reading this on Sunday you may still have time to enter. Apparently there is to be a prize. I've submitted my entry. When they are all up, I'll ask if anybody can work out which one it is.

2006-04-02T16:14:00.000+01:00

In 1809 the journey from Painswick to reading would have taken a day. I have not managed to work out the route from Paterson's Roads, but I doubt that it would have been straightforward.

For me it was simply a matter of following the instructions from my GPS unit, and putting up with a bit of a cross-wind and the odd shower. It took me less than two hours.

My destination was Reading Town Hall, where Julie Cohen was launching her first two books for Mills and Boon.

In Featured Attraction, the hero and heroine find themselves trapped overnight inside a cinema, with a year's supply of popcorn, a year's supply of chocolate-covered raisins, and a year's supply of condoms. It was appropriate that beside the champagne, we toasted Julie's success with at least two of those items.

Being a Bad Girl features a hero who rides a motorbike. She had never ridden on one before she wrote it, although she managed to charm a young man at her local Harley Davidson dealer into telling her all about it. Julie's first ride came when I gave her a lift on the back of my bike during last year's RNA conference. For that she very kindly gave me an acknowledgement in Being a Bad Girl, although she had to admit that the book was already with Mills and Boon, so I cannot really claim to have contributed to the creative process.

Thanks to Rosie for the photo of Julie being deservedly happy.

2006-04-01T22:29:00.000+01:00

I spent quite a bit of yesterday attending a creative writing workshop at the very lovely Painswick Hotel given by the equally lovely Katie Fforde . The event was being filmed for a three part TV series on romantic fiction presented by Daisy Goodwin, which has been commissioned by the BBC and will be broadcast, if everything goes according to plan, in October.

The three programmes will apparently cover "heroes", "heroines" and "happy ever after" or something like that. Katie structured the day along similar lines, so we started with a discussion of the great romantic heroes - not just Heathcliff, Darcy and Rochester, but also more modern examples like Jilly Cooper's Rupert Campbell-Black. Katie argued that romantic fiction allows the reader to have a safe "virtual affair" with the hero, so we had to make the hero someone that readers would fall for in a big way.

Then we had to do some work. We had ten minutes to write a passage that describes a fictional hero - giving some idea of his appearance, what he does, what sort of car he drives, what he's like - but does so allusively, rather than through straightforward physical description. Show, not tell.

After we had read out our passages (and taken a coffee break, and some shorter breaks to change tapes in the camera, reshot the odd fluffed comment from Katie, and worked through all the other joys of being filmed) we moved on to heroines. We nominated various favourites, and discussed the importance of their being realistic. Readers want to identify with the heroine, so she has to be plausible - achievably beautiful rather than impossibly gorgeous, not too stupid, and so on.

More writing for us. This time we had to describe our heroines, but we had to do it from within their own point of view, with no recourse to looking in mirrors or other popular clichés. Since this is something that I have been wrestling with in Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth, I was glad of the chance to have a go at it in a different context.

Then we discussed the whole question of what constitutes romantic fiction, and romances. Not surprisingly we dsidn't reach a definitive view, but the centrality of a relationship between two people that includes a distinctly sexual element (even if not actually consummated), and the importance of an emotional appeal to the reader were both part of the answer.

Another exercise now; a description of the second time that our hero and heroine from the earlier exercises meet each other. The first meeting is usually a chance encounter. The second shows how the relationship is developing. We had ten minutes to get some of that down on our writing pads.

And at that point, with more tape changing and reshooting being done, I had to leave, to get down to Reading for a book launch, about which more tomorrow.

2006-03-26T16:10:00.000+01:00

So, if Lord Alexander Harrow looks like Ingres' sketch of Lord Grantham, what does Miss Charlotte Hopesay look like? I have been particularly concerned about this since my agent (hereafter referred to as Anne-Marie, since repeatedly saying "my agent" sounds a bit pretentious) pointed out that I give no physical description of her at all, beyond what she wears.

Well, she's not one of Heyer's junoesque heroines, like Sophia Stanton-Lacy (let salone Nell Stornaway), but neither is she particularly petite. She is not an incomparable beauty like Miss Isabella Milbourne, but she is pretty - even striking - if she wants to be. Her hair is neither flaxen curls nor raven tresses, but a reddish brown, and her eyes are hazel. In other words she looks something like this. Heather Findlay from the progressive rock group Mostly Autumn, who, as it happens, are playing in Cirencester in a couple of week's time. If the concert hasn't sold out yet, I'll be there.

Since, during the course of Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth, Miss Hopesay is drugged, jilted, goes into the wilds of Gloucestershire where she crawls around in attics, gets knocked on the head, tied up and then caught up in an explosion, she doesn't always look as calm as in that first photograph. But then again, neither does Miss Findlay.

2006-03-25T23:05:00.000Z

Today was supposed to be a good day for doing my rewrites, but that didn't seem to happen. I started the day haring around Cheltenham to get a vital part to fix my motorbike (large silver BMW two-cylinder thing - think of it as a pair of matched greys) not to mention securing a copy of the latest Harry Potter DVD in exchange for a chunk of the Wenlock heir's accumulated allowance.

But the main distraction was sorting out something to wear to a book launch next Friday. The invitation says "sparkly", but my wardrobe doesn't do sparkly, not even a little bit. Clearly it was time to break out the inner Martha Stewart, and create a sparkly T-shirt that was, at least vaguely, me.

I started with Ingres' sketch of Lord Grantham, which is as good an illustration of Lord Alexander Harrow as I can find. With a little messing about on the computer and a great deal more playing around with tracing paper, drafting pens, craft knives and acetate sheets I turned the head and shoulders into a simpler and more striking illustration, in stencil form.

The other design element that I needed was a suitable font for a caption. I went with the Jane Austen font that the nice people at Austenblog alerted me to a while back.

Putting it all together with some glittery fabric paint and a heavy-duty long-sleeved black T-shirt, I came up with this, which, although I say it myself, isn't too bad a result.

As Mrs Wenlock pointed out, if I can't make the novel-writing pay, I could always set up a stall at Camden Market selling glittery T-shirts to Goths with Regency tastes.

2006-03-23T22:21:00.000Z

OK, so it may not quite have the kudos of the list written in a book of gold by the angel encountered by Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase), but Ampersand have updated their client list, and Lo! My name leads all the rest.

2006-03-19T18:17:00.000Z

Heyeroines in need of a slap

21. Cressida Stavely (False Colours)

The discovery that a man has spent an entire evening at your home lying to you about almost every important aspect of himself might provoke a range of reactions in any young lady of gentle birth and finely-honed sensibility. Blithely forming a cladestine understanding with him would not usually fall within this range. That, however, is how Miss Stavely responds to the dishonourable behaviour of the Honourable Christopher Fancot.

Of course any woman might make a mistake, and had Miss Stavely resiled from her initial course of action once she had discovered a little more about the Fancot menage all might have been forgotten, but this is not to be.

Quizzed in the course of that first fateful evening by the Dowager Lady Stavely, not even Kit Fancot, in training to be sent abroad to lie for his country, could conceal the fact that he had an Uncle called Brumby. What Cressy soon learns, however, is that Brumby is not his only uncle. Indeed Brumby is not his most bizarrely-named uncle. That particular laurel falls to his uncle Cosmo Cliffe.

This should have been more than enough to send any sensible girl running from the Fancot family with all the speed she could muster, but Miss Stavely apparently thinks herself to be made of sterner stuff. This is, perhaps due to her belief that her first name is, if not as heroic as that of Miss Wantage in Friday's Child, at least somewhat epic and heroic.

There is a limit even to epic heroism, and the character of Lady Denville should have alerted her that she was over the limit. Much can be made of the relative contributions to a person's character from nature and nurture, but Kit Fancot must have been indebted to his mother for the overwhelming majority of each. Lady Denville's idea of frugality is, after all, to limit her supply of household necessities to forty eight pounds of wax lights and two casks of genuine spermaceti oil (allegedly from Barret, but originally from a genuine sperm whale), two Westphalian Hams, several pounds of tea, superfine vanilla, treble-refined sugar and a large quantity of wafers from Gunter's.

But the real danger does not come from Lady Denville, but from her constant companion, Sir Bonamy Ripple, to whom the above might serve as a late evening snack. Bonamy Ripple sounds like a large and unhealthy desert dish, but on closer examination he turns out to be a very large meal, with several removes involving quail, ducklings, and a green goose. He is also distinctly catching. Within a few pages of Sir Bonamy's appearance in the book (page 79 in the Arrow edition), Miss Stavely finds herself "in a little ripple of amusement" (page 123). By page 277 she has aquired "gravity" and is talking of widgeons. Whatever it is that Sir Bonamy spreads about him, while it may not be 'flu, it is quite definitely avian.

And yet still Miss Stavely appears to maintain the illusion that she can cope with all this, and that thanks to whatever she has taken from her great namesake, she can win through despite the hugely unfavourable odds.

I fear that she is mistaken. The original of her name was a tragic heroine who betrayed her lover with a greek warrior. The victory against overwhelming odds was spelled "Crécy".

Technorati Tags: heyeroines

2006-03-19T16:31:00.000Z

Heyeroines in need of a slap

20. Nell Cardross (April Lady)

Once again I suspect that there might be some debate over who the true heyeroine of April Lady might be. At no point is the expression used to describe Lady Cardross or (nor indeed Lady Letitia Merion). This must inevitably leave those who believe Miss Amanda Summercourt to be the heyeroine of Sprig Muslin at a bit of a loss. They might, of course, put forward the argument that a true heyeroine, even if she doesn't end up marrying the heyero, must appear in the first chapter. A careful review of the start of the book does indeed reveal a potential candidate on page 16 of the Arrow edition.

Unfortunately, despite this promising start, old Mother Wenlock makes no further appearance in the story, so I fear that, for all her magnificent and noble characteristics, we cannot count her as the heyeroine. That pretty much leaves us with no viable option other than the Countess of Cardross.

This immediately presents us with a problem. Read as a simple romance, April Lady has little to recommend it. The plot appears to be a simple rehash of The Convenient Marriage, but without a compelling villain, or perhaps Friday's Child without, well, without whatever it is that makes that worth reading. The "Nemesis" stuff, probably.

But it would be an error to treat April Lady as a romance. It is clearly a thriller. The relationship between Giles and Nell is well handled of course, but it is really a sideshow. The heart of the book concerns Madame Lavalle, and her partner, Mr Warren, the perfumier.

Note that we are never actually told why Madame Lavalle is making such spirited attempts to dun one of her more best clients. This is, of course, a great example of Miss Heyer expecting her readers to work it out for themselves. As you would expect from a mistress of whodunnits, the clues are all there, and it is in the first chapter that the key pointer can be found. It is Mr Warren's bill for Olympian Dew.

The Irvine family have something of a reputation for what we would nowadays refer to as addictive personalities. In the case of Lord Pevensey this expresses itself in a tendenct to gamble. In the case of his son, Viscount Dysart, it finds its expression in a compulsion to carve his initials in every tree in St James' Park, and to time himself doing so. In Nell's case it is substance abuse, and, primed by the reference to Nell's substance of choice, we can spot the tell-tale signs of addiction in much, if not all that she does.

Like LSD, Olympic Dew would appear to have effects that are much more interesting to the person taking the substance than to any observer. Where someone who drops acid sees marvellous visions that nobody else can see, the dabbler in Dew indulges in internal contemplation about her life and the state of her marriage at such tedious length that anyone caught up with her is likely to throw their copy of April Lady against the nearest wall and dig out the latest Bernard Cornwell.

That option is not, however, available to those caught up in the Dew trade. While the Countess of Cardross can ignore all the proprieties, and have improper discussions with strange men in Ryder Street, poor Mr Warren and Madame Lavalle must live in fear of the Dew barons, seeking payment for the stuff that they have provided. While Nell plays at highway robbery, the real villains pursue Madame Lavalle to the point where she feels that she is being forced to flee the country.

It is again a mark of Miss Heyer's writing skills that we are never explicitly told who the shadowy figures behind the Olympian Dew trade are, but the rules of this sort of fiction ensure that the smarter reader - and Miss Heyer knew that her readers would be smarter than the average - can work it out. Once again, the early chapters hold the key. Surely the prime candidate for the ringleader is none other than the mysterious and shadowy Lady Orsett? But she too shadowy and mysterious to be the only villain. She must have an accomplice.

This accomplice must be able to move freely between the haut ton, where Dew is dropped, and the source of this deadly substance, which is in Foreign Parts. What profession allows for this sort of behaviour? Obviously the Diplomatic Service. Is there a diplomat among the cast of characters? Indeed there is: Jeremy Allandale.

As soon as we understand where Mr Allandale stands, the book takes on a darker complexion. Letty's attempts to get Mr Allandale alone with her are suddenly chilling - he must be seeking to isolate her. Letty's choice of pink rather than cerise is not a fashion mistake, but a cry for help, and Mr Allandale's apparent abduction of Letty towards the end of the story is, in fact, an abduction.

And yet, happily doing the Dew, the Countess of Cardross is aware of none of this, nor does she apparently ever establish how her long suffering husband sorts it all out, through his involvement with that clandestine government agency only ever referred to as "Another Interest".

As with many great writers, the secret of Miss Heyer's storytelling lies in what she leaves unsaid. Nonetheless, I do feel that she might at least have been explicit about Nell's need for some sharp correction.

Technorati Tags: heyeroines

2006-03-19T14:54:00.000Z

My apologies for the long gap in posting. Normal service, or at least what passes for it on Wenlock, will resume very shortly.

Significant news over the last three weeks includes a decision by my agent that the latest draft of Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth isn't quite ready to be shown to publishers. It did not therefore get an outing at the London Bookfair. We are meeting later this week to discuss what more needs doing.

While I have not been that active, the Wenlock heir has written an entire novel; nine chapters and an epilogue. It is action packed stuff involving rather more dinosaurs than dukes.

Watch out for a discussion of Nell Cardross later today, with Cressida Stavely not far behind.

2006-02-28T22:06:00.000Z

I sent the revised first three chapters of Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth off to my agent yesterday. In fact I sent six chapters: the first few chapters were always the longest, and the first has grown longer as a result of some wholesale changes to scenes. The later chapters will get shorter as I flense them in the interests of pace. It made sense to even up the chapter length by splitting the first three each in half.

As a result the hero and heroine don't meet each other until towards the end of chapter 4. This is not best practice for romantic fiction, I fear.

I also changed my hero's surname. This was partly in response to the appearance of a hero by the name of Matthew Hawkwood in James McGee's Ratcatcher, and partly in response to Jan's comment that his original surname always made her think of outdoor clothing. So, he is no longer Lord Alexander Hawkshead, but Lord Alexander Harrow.

Following a link from Language Log, I thought that I should check the new name for sluttishness, using the Slut-o-meter created by Joël Franusic and Adam Smith.

There I discover that "Hawkshead" is 7.33% slutty, while "Harrow" at 2.7% is positively pristine. By way of comparison, "Darcy" is 4.63% slutty, "Rochester" 6.69%, (Rhett) "Butler" a disappointing 1.29% and "Heathcliffe" a bizarre -63% slutty.

Jane Austen (4.71%) and Georgette Heyer (10.23%) are both fairly demure, with Wenlock, at 3.05%, purer than either. My own name, however, scores a rather disturbing 93.97% slutty.

2006-02-26T18:35:00.000Z

In her Bookworm on the Net blog today, Anne Weale flagged up Storycode (US readers should go here), a site which collates reader assessments of novels, and uses them to come up with recommendations for other books.

I had a go at coding a book, picking April Lady as I have just finished reading it (will Nell merit a slap? Watch this space). Having moved sliders around to give my views on how romantic it was (very), how horrific (not at all), how erotic (barely), how exotic (fairly) and which among the seven basic plots it used, I ended up being recommended Bella Pollen's Hunting Unicorns, Terry Pratchett's Mort(!), and some old thing called Pride and Prejudice.

Sylvester appeared further down the list. A bit of poking around suggested that of all Heyer's works, the only ones coded so far were Sylvester (once) and A Civil Contract (twice).

I think that this could be a really useful site, once it has a few thousand more contributors, so I strongly encourage you all to give it a go.

2006-02-19T15:51:00.000Z

Heyeroines in need of a slap

19. Horatia Winwood (The Convenient Marriage)

The youngest Miss Winwood manages to commit so many social solecisms that it would hardly be a surprise if most of the upper ten thousand were crying out for a chance to slap the girl. Horry is, however, a Winwood, and if she has little else, she has the Nose. For this alone one must inevitably forgive her much.

But not everything. There are some things, and one in particular, that are beyond the power of a single nose - or indeed any number of noses - to remedy.

With no money to their name, the females of the Winwood family must base their not Ainconsiderable reputations upon less tangible things. among the most precious of these is the ability, and indeed willingness, to Talk with Capital Letters. As one might expect, it is Lady Winwood who is most expert at this. When she says that her Days are Numbered, one can readily believe that they have not merely been counted, but individually signed for, wrapped, stamped and secured with the sort of seal that one finds only in the more anagogical parts of the Bible.

Lady Winwood's two oldest daughters are similarly skilled, able to deploy Cassandra-like prophecies of doom in the face of even the most minor of domestic mishaps. This is the sort of social skill that is beyond price, without which no Grande Dame can have any pretensions to Grandeur. Even their otherwise unremarkable cousin, Mrs Maulfrey, is able to endow such a word as Settlements with a sonority beyond its real significance.

Miss Horatia Winwood, on the other hand, seems utterly uninclined to indulge in any such utterances. Indeed it is hard to find evidence of her Uttering anything at all. Even her interjections - typically "Stuff" and "Pho" - have their capitalisation subverted by Horry's stammer(not that the stammer itself is to be condemned - indeed one might come to like it, along with the eyebrows and, of course, the Nose). Such is her blasé attitude towards life that she cannot be bothered even to think in terms of Scandals and Scrapes, choosing instead to admit to mere scandals and scrapes. Is this Behaviour Befitting a Countess? I am sure that it is not only I who thinks not.

A Winwood who does not Capitalise her Speech is, one might feel, hardly a Winwood at all, and one who, when kissed, not gently at all, but ruthlessly, crushing all the breath out of her body, merely observes that she never knew that her husband could kiss like that, rather than perhaps falling into a Swoon, or Fainting Dead Away, clearly needs to Buck Up her Ideas.

Technorati Tags: heyeroines

2006-02-18T17:15:00.000Z

While in the capital this week, I visited what might be considered Wenlock's spiritual London home.
I used to visit the Wenlock Arms occasionally in my younger days, when I lived in that part of the world. It went into a bit of a decline, and it has been almost two decades since I was last there. I was delighted to renew my acquaintance. It seems to have changed very little in appearance over the years, but the beer is much better than I remember, both in range and quality. I am not at all surprised that it tends to win CAMRA awards.

The Wenlock name comes from the mediaeval moated manor house of Wenlock's Barn that once stood nearby. In addition to the pub, the name has attached to a couple of local streets, and to the Wenlock Basin, which branches off the Regent's Canal.
It is shown on Greenwood's 1827 Map of London - it is the unnamed basin in the top right-hand corner, which looks like a very new addition to the map, as the lines symbolising water don't follow the edge of the basin. Wenlock's Barn is shown at the top left-hand corner of the next panel of the map. It would appear that the pub postdates the Regency by a few years, as they make clear.

If you ever visit, then the sandwiches are well worth sampling. Proper doorsteps, made with extremely fresh bread. Salt Beef seems to be the favourite variety, but I went for black pudding.

There are building works on the other side of the street, with luxury apartments going up with views of the pub or the basin. One would make the ideal Wenlock London pied-à-terre.

2006-02-17T23:38:00.000Z

The Wenlock family is just back from a visit to the Great Wen, to borrow Mr Cobbett's charming phrase (but then you should see what he has to say about the delightful spa town in which Wenlock currently has his abode). One of the principal purposes of the visit was to take part in a Valentine's Day debate at Upminster Library on the motion that men are as romantic as women.

Proposing the motion were, from left to right, Roger Sanderson (caught in the act of producing some red roses for our opponents), Michael Taylor and Wenlock. Despite (or perhaps because of) meeting in a nearby hostelry some ninety minutes beforehand in order to work out some tactics, I am not sure quite how coherent our line of attack was, although Julie Cohen makes a brave attempt to explain it.

My own argument was from the heroes of classic romantic novels: Heathcliffe, Max de Winter, Rhett Butler, Rochester and, of course, Darcy. They may not always be pleasant to have around, being frequently selfish, arrogant, rude and grim (and not always having Ten Thousand a year to make up for it), but despite these failings they are somewhat more stirring of the emotions than the assorted Janes, Lizzies and Cathys against whom they play out their parts. I would be tempted to exempt Scarlet O'Hara from such criticism were she not such a self-centered cow who really ought to have come in for more of a slapping than Bridget Jones. As for the second Mrs De Winter: as a heroine I reckon that she shows less personality than either her predecessor (who labours under the disadvantage of being more than somewhat dead), or indeed Manderley.

Our opponents were, from right to left, Julie Cohen, Katie Fforde and Elizabeth Lord. Julie's arguments tended to involve reading out smutty lyrics from current hit records, and noting that her husband had nobly sent her off to Upminster on Valentine's Night rather than staying in for champagne and chocolate (Mrs Wenlock chose to accompany to the debate, and it was she who took these photographs, but I would not want to use that fact to score any debating points. Katie brought the subject of cheesecutter thongs into the debate, while Elizabeth Lord accused Byron of writing for money (I am giving a somewhat partial account of things, in both senses of the word - Julie's account is probably more reliable).

After the audience had had their say there was a poll of the audience, which ended in a tie broken by the chairman's casting vote which went to our side. We then went back to the pub. All in all, a very enjoyable way to spend the evening of Valentine's Day.

2006-02-12T23:56:00.000Z

Heyeroines in need of a slap

18. Henrietta Silverdale (Charity Girl)

It is hardly an unusual position to be in. We saw it five years earlier with Sir Gareth Ludlow, and we shall see it again in a year or so with his Grace Adolphus Gillespie Vernon Ware. A heyero arrives with some unsuitably young girl in tow, drops her off with you and your family to look after, and then goes gallivanting off on his adventures. What can you do?

Well, if you are Miss Silverdale you can do a great deal better than meekly accepting the situation and leaving your reader to endure Ashley Carrington on the Road, a deeply unedifying travelogue involving High Harrowgate, Low Harrowgate and all that lies between (more than would be strictly necessary if only Carrington, or, as we should perhaps more properly style him, Viscount 'Des' Desford, could be bothered to go via the stile), and which takes in unduly frosty landladies and unduly cantankerous old men who have married their unduly plebeian housekeepers, or, as they apparently wish to be styled (as if it made a ha'porth of difference), 'Lady Housekeepers'.

It is not as if Miss Silverdale's circumstances are exactly unpropitious. A household containing an unmarried daughter and an ineffectual father (ineffectual as a result of having died some years earlier, but that is beside the point) discovers that a nearby house has been occupied by a single man in possession of a fortune. If the house is not called 'Nether-something' then at least the single gentleman is. This is surely something that a heyeroine with a ready intelligence and a good sense of humour could make something of - perhaps the new neighbour, who after all is bound to fall in love with somebody in the household, might have a good friend who is rich and handsome, but lacking in manners?

Or if not that, then what about the female servant whose loyalty to the woman she still considers as her mistress is threatened by a new arrival, an apparent interloper who has been swept off her feet and delivered to the house without anyone really having thought things through, and who, as a result, ends up in very real danger of her life. Could Miss Silverdale really not come up with the idea that somebody might, one night, have dreamed they went to Inglehurst?

But no. Miss Silverdale appears to believe that she should take as a role model Lady Hester Theale, and do the dutiful wet-goose thing. Such behaviour in one described by no less an authority than Simon Carrington as "sound as a trout" simply will not do. What if Fitzwilliam Darcy had decided that, rather than hanging out with Bingley and generally making things happen, he would prefer to be as dull an old stick as Henry Tilney? What if John Melmoth had stayed at home? What if Montoni had brought in an architect to remodel Udolpho along Palladian lines?

It is simply not to be thought of, and yet in Miss Henrietta Silverdale we have a heyeroine so lacking in romantic sensibility that instead of a cat fight between Miss Charity Steane and the frightful ~~Mrs Danvers~~ Hepzibah Cardle we have Wilfred Steane in a purple jacket being tedious with Simon Carrington; instead of wild happenings in the stormy woods around ~~Otranto~~ Inglehurst we have Desford's groom getting into a snit. This is not Byronic, this is not Gothic, this is not remotely horrid.

If this is what we must expect from our heyeroines, we might as well go back to the Brontës.

Technorati Tags: heyeroines

2006-02-05T18:15:00.000Z

There has been a fair amount of discussion of viewpoint in the last few days on ROMNA, the mailing list (or, as it calls itself, the cyber chapter) of the Romantic Novelists' Association. Hilary Johnson, who runs a highly respected Authors' Advisory Service, has said that viewpoint is the single biggest source of problems in the typescripts that she is sent.

I know that some writers have trouble with viewpoint, but until today I had thought that I found it easy enough to understand, and to handle. It is, after all, simply a matter of deciding through whose eyes you are seeing the action, and only writing about what that character sees, feels or knows.

The important part is sticking to the same viewpoint through a whole scene. In some cases, of course, it is a matter of sticking to the same viewpoint for the whole book. With the fairly convoluted plot of Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth I knew that I would not be able to manage this.

So, what has been my problem today?

I was rewriting a scene early in the book, and I wanted to use it to cast a bit more light on Lord Alexander, without going in for too much internal reflection - I need to keep the pace up at this point in the story. I therefore chose to use the other character in the scene as the viewpoint character. This made it easier to describe our hero, in terms of his dress, his manner, the colour of his eyes. However it became much harder to drive the action forward.

My viewpoint character's role in the scene was rather reactive. He knows things that Lord Alexander needs to learn, but he doesn't do anything to drive the story along. This turned out to be a problem, because I couldn't use his knowledge directly. It was no good his thinking about what he knows; he still had to tell Lord Alexander, and the repetition was killing the pace. If he didn't think about it, then the whole scene became a load of telling, not showing, and that made for dead prose too.

In the end I had to scrap the whole rewrite, after about 2,000 words, and start again, with Lord Alexander as the viewpoint character. Once I made that rather painful decision everything started flowing much more easily, and I am sure that the result will be much tauter.

I just can't afford to make this sort of mistake too often, because I have at least a soft deadline ahead of me.

2006-02-04T08:01:00.000Z

Some six months ago, in my very first post on Wenlock I said:

I am currently working on a Romantic Regency Romp, James Bond meets Georgette Heyer, complete with fireworks and at least one elephant.

Rather a presumptious statement, now I look back on it.

James Bond was, of course, the creation of Ian Fleming. Ian Fleming's literary agent was a man called Peter Janson-Smith. In 2003 he joined up with Peter Buckman to form the Ampersand Agency. The most notable name on their client list is (the estate of) Georgette Heyer.

At some point soon another name will be going up on that client list - mine. Having started by claiming literary kinship with two of the most popular authors of the last 50 years, I now find myself represented by an agency with strong connections to both.

Which is nice.

2006-02-02T21:23:00.000Z

There is a much misquoted remark by Anton Chekhov that originally read something like

One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.
(From a letter to Aleksandr Semenovich Lazarev, 1 November 1889)

(although on the web it is usually described as putting pistols on mantelpieces.)

The rewriting that I am doing at the moment is in part a matter of removing undischarged rifles from the stage. Having done no plotting at all when I started to write, I put quite a number of contrivances and devices into the early chapters because I thought that they might come in handy later on. I was actually surprised how many of them did turn out to be useful - including a walk-on Frenchman and, most importantly, a scene-stealing elephant. But not all of them were winners.

My problem is that the rifles are not always that easy to remove. Some of them are like the Dude's rug in The Big Lebowski. That rug really tied the room together. Take it away, and there is a big empty space.

There is one particular rifle that I am working on at the moment. In fact it is a Japanese miniature tinder pistol. I saw this picture of it and decided that it would be a perfect gadget for Lord Alexander to carry with him and use in an emergency, just as James Bond is equipped with various miniature gadgets usually disguised as fountain pens or watches.

The tinder pistol formed the basis of a conversation in Chapter One between Lord Alexander and his friend Sir Peregrine Caradoc (a slightly eccentric Natural Philosopher) during which they revealed some of the backstory. The problem was that at no subsequent point in the plot did a situation arise in which Lord Alexander needed to start a fire. So I find that I must confiscate the tinder pistol and give him something else to discuss with Sir Peregrine.

Luckily I also need to put a few rifles onto the stage too: rifles that are fired, but fired a little implausibly because we hadn't already been alerted to their existence. In this particular case I have found myself removing a miniature-tinder-pistol-shaped rifle, and replacing it with a very-large-gas-balloon-shaped one. Not surprisingly, this has required me to completely rebuild the stage.

It is at times like this that I think how lucky I am that my agent could see enough good stuff in Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth that she was not put off by such flaws.

2006-01-29T20:53:00.000Z

I try not to do negative or grumpy posts on Wenlock, but some times things make me a bit cross. A case in point was today's Open Book on BBC Radio 4. You can listen to the programme from the BBC website for the next seven days (it needs Real Player).

A listener called the programme's Readers' Clinic asking for to be recommended romantic comedy for an intelligent reader. I was so taken aback by what was suggested for her that I ended up e-mailing Open Book to complain. Since their automatic response says that they don't read or reply to all their e-mails I thought that I would post my message here.

I was very disappointed with the response on today's programme to your reader's query about romantic comedy for intelligent readers. The tone was set by Mariella's flippant remark about the term being an oxymoron, but it was Tim Lott's selection of books which was the biggest problem.

There is nothing wrong with any of the books per se. Two are already classics of modern American literature[John Updike's Rabbit Run and Anne Tyler's The Accidental Tourist], and the other two [Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Nick Hornby's About a Boy] will no doubt achieve similar status in time, but, with the possible exception of the Nick Hornby, none of them would strike an intelligent reader as being romantic comedy.

I am an intelligent reader who reads romantic fiction, and I can suggest a number of authors who would fit your listener's requirements somewhat better than Anne Tyler, John Updike and Jonathan Franzen.

I would start with Georgette Heyer, whose historical romances are stuffed with wit and humour. Frederica is one of her best.

Then there is Katie Fforde, whose books cannot easily be dismissed as light-weight "chick lit". The characters are engaging, the situations are plausible, the outcomes are just the thing to drive away midwinter blues. Try Paradise Fields.

I won't go on, but I will point out that romantic fiction is probably second only to crime in terms of its popularity. Surely Open Book can serve readers of romantic fiction better than it does?

cheers
Stephen Bowden
(a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association team that reached the final of University Challenge - the Professionals last year)

Unlike other BBC arts programmes (such as the always excellent Front Row), Open Book has a bit of a track record of sneering at romantic fiction, which is a great pity.

2006-01-29T10:40:00.000Z

One of the changes that I am going to have to make to Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth is the title. It's not the length, nor the punctuation. It's just that, as my agent pointed out to me, it isn't really Lord Alexander's cipher at all. He didn't create it (that was the French), nor did he break it (that was his mathematical friend Piers Monkhopton).

The cipher is, of course, critical to the plot, and Lord Alexander Hawkshead is the hero, but combining them both into a snappy but meaningful title isn't quite that easy. On the other hand, my agent likes the Bridekirk Behemoth part, so that will stay for the time being.

Another change that I fear will be necessary is to Lord Alexander's surname. Having spent a year writing an exciting and vaguely romantic adventure story about French spies and English heroes in the early 19th Century, I have now discovered that I am not the only one.

I haven't read James McGee's Ratcatcher yet (and I won't do so until I have delivered my rewrites), but my agent read it in manuscript a while back. She doesn't think that it scuppers me in any way, although it has probably holed some of my ideas for the sequel (Lady Cardington's Folly; or, the Limehouse Leviathan) below the waterline.

However there is the small matter of our respective heroes. Mine is Lord Alexander Hawkshead; James McGee's is Matthew Hawkwood. You can see the problem. If I changed his name to Handsawhead, would anybody know the difference?

2006-01-28T15:39:00.000Z

My agent called me yesterday to say that the Agency has changed their mind.

Instead of waiting to see how I got on with the suggestions for rewrites, and then, if all has gone well, to sign me up, they have decided to take me on anyway, right now. The letter is in the post.

Originally the plan was for me not to send anything in before the middle of March, because my agent would be far too busy dealing with the London Book Fair. The new plan is, if I can manage it, for me to send at least the first couple of chapters by mid-February, ahead of the London Book Fair, so that my agent can tout Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth around editors at the ExCel Centre in London's happening Docklands.

I don't know what has triggered this latest development, but I am very happy about it.

2006-01-22T10:03:00.000Z

Today is the 219th birthday of George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron.

So, we'll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

2006-01-19T22:52:00.000Z

Well, I had a meeting with my agent on Wednesday, and the fact that I am starting to say "my" agent should give you a clue about how things went. The fact that there are still no names should indicate there's still a long way to go.

We spent two hours going through Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth and discussing all its faults. We barely touched on anything good about it (except that the first scene of the final chapter must not be touched because it is just right). Despite this distinctly unbalanced analysis I came away feeling very positive. After all, unless there was quite a bit right, it wouldn't have been worth the two hours on what is wrong.

So what are the problems? It's too long, by about 10,000 words (it's a smidge over 100,000 at the moment). It's too wordy, and the pace is too even. I think that these all go together - by stripping down the prose in some scenes, particularly in the second half of the book, I should be able to up the pace and lose some length. I'll need to dig out my notes on Pace from Annie Burgh's workshops on the subject.

Some of the characterisation needs a bit of work. The eponymous hero, Lord Alexander, is OK, but the heroine needs a bit of warming up. Some of the secondary characters need a bit more fleshing out, and in one particular case where a character turns up near the end after bowing out of the plot at an early stage, I need to do something to remind the reader of his continuing existence in-between. My favourite character, a nine-year old girl who is intended to be the heroine of the third book of what I see as a linked set of stories, is fine. I just need to develop my mental images of the others to the extent that I have a picture of her.

I need to add more vitality and impetus to the opening few scenes, and in some other places. This is linked to the pace issue above, but it is particularly critical here. The scene at which my agent felt the story really got going was some 20 pages in. Many editors won't get that far if it isn't a bit more tense and urgent from the start. In some of the other scenes that need this tightening I know that there is detail that I can trim, but for the opening scenes I need something else.

I also need to put in more at an early stage that sets the political scene. Readers won't all know just what was happening in the Spring of 1809 (a low point in the Penninsula War, and something of a mess in terms of both British and French politics) and a bit of background helps explain what is going on among the villains. The trouble is that this is precisely the sort of thing that kills pace and tension. I am currently reading Dennis Wheatley's Roger Brook books and he has a really bad habit of having his characters stop everything to discuss the latest political and military developments, whether or not they have a strong bearing on the plot. The last thing I want is for Lord Alexander spending anytime telling his colleagues what they already know.

There are one or two plot implausibilities or even impossibilities that need to be worked through, but luckily none that drive a stake through the heart of the storyline.

In addition to these major issues I need to sort out some stylistic problems (too many "said"s in the dialogue tags, too many "that"s , especially in dialogue, too few commas, too many people saying "indeed" in response to remarks.

And then there are the detailed bits and pieces scattered across most pages - potential anachronisms to be double-checked, infelicitous turns of phrase (including some real clunkers that I should have spotted myself), slip-ups in surnames and relationships, eccentric capitalisation, all that good stuff.

Despite all of this, there wasn't a single moment when I felt that this agent wasn't on my side, or wanted me to write something that wasn't what I had in my head. This is going to be my book, but thanks to her it is going to be a much, much better version of it. And while the title may need a bit of tweaking (the first half more than the second), the elephant still gets to stay in the very final sentence.

So I have a great deal to think about, and a great deal to do. Can I do it? I think that I can. How long have I got? Well, there are no external deadlines, but my agent is expecting to hear from me before the end of April. My own target is the end of March at the latest. I started Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth from scratch - not a single word nor fragment of a plot aready in my head - in the first week of April last year. In her new column in the Telegraph, confusingly titled A novel in a year, Louise Doughty says

Your novel will take you as long as it takes you - but I'm going to stick my neck out and say that if you haven't written a book before and are really serious about it and have a job or a family or - heaven forbid - both, then you are looking at around three years from start to finish.

I'm aiming to shave two years off that. If I can produce a publishable novel in a year, while holding down a full-time office job, then I think that I will be able to hold my head up high.

2006-01-17T22:04:00.000Z

The Long List for the Romantic Novelists' Association's Foster Grant Romantic Novel of the Year was published today, and it looks something like this:

Playing with Fire by Diana Appleyard (Black Swan)
Daughter of Mine by Anne Bennett (HarperCollins)
Winds of Honour by Ashleigh Bingham (Robert Hale)
The Other Woman by Iris Gower (Bantam)
An Eligible Bachelor by Veronica Henry (Penguin)
As the Night Ends by Audrey Howard (Hodder)
Laughing as They Chased Us by Sarah Jackman (Simon & Schuster)
Gardens of Delight by Erica James (Orion)
The Borgia Bride by Jeanne Kalogridis (HarperCollins)
State of the Union by Douglas Kennedy (Random House)
Recipes for a Perfect Marriage by Mary Kate Kerrigan (Pan Macmillan)
The September Girls by Maureen Lee (Orion)
All My Sisters by Judith Lennox (Pan Macmillan)
The Ship of Brides by JoJo Moyes (Hodder)
The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens (Penguin)
A Lesser Evil by Lesley Pearse (Penguin)
Look the World in the Eye by Alice Peterson (Black Swan)
Lie By Moonlight by Amanda Quick (Piatkus)
The Lost Art of Telling Secrets by Eva Rice (Headline Review)
Turning Point by Bowering Sivers (Transita)
True Believer by Nicholas Sparks (Time Warner)
Falling Into Place by Linda Taylor (Heinemann)
Pond Lane and Paris by Susie Vereker (Transita)

Congratulations to all the long-listed authors. The Short List will be announced, as ever, on Valentine's Day.

Only one of these could be described as a Regency - Ashleigh Bingham's Winds of Honour. I thought that Amanda Quick's Lie by Moonlight would be one too, but it seems to be set in the early Victorian period.

And as far as I can tell, not one of these books features an elephant in a significant role. Oh well, maybe next year.

2006-01-15T14:29:00.000Z

Heyeroines in need of a slap

17. Annis Wychwood (Lady of Quality)

Judging by the response to my animadversions upon Lady Hester Theale, I will now be deluged by suggestions to the effect that the true heyeroine of Lady of Quality is Miss Carleton-with-an-e. I expect this point to be made particularly by those of my readers who happen to be called Lucilla. They will, no doubt, be faced down by a battalion of Corisandes, promoting Miss Stinchcombe's claims to the title, only for these to be routed by a monstrous regiment of Marias acting on behalf of Miss Farlow. I will, however, remain deaf and blind to such entreaties. As far as I am concerned, our heyeroine is Miss Wychwood.

I am grateful to Mr Roger Burton West for pointing out that according to Nicholas Culpeper's excellent Complete Herbal,

Annis seeds, heat and dry, ease pain, expel wind, cause a sweet breath, help the dropsy, resist poison, breed milk, and stop the Fluor Albus in women, provoke venery, and ease the head-ache.

Venery is, of course, the practice or sport of hunting beasts of game. Fluor Albus, I should point out, especially to younger readers (and here I do include you, Miss Garrett), has nothing to do with headmasters at schools of witchcraft and wizardry, but is instead a form of mucus. Mucus is not something upon which Wenlock has any desire to dwell, leaving that to other journals especially set up for the purpose.

So is Mr Culpeper's description a fair assessment of Miss Wychwood's character, or is she in fact little more than a self-deluding fraud? Let us examine the evidence.

Miss Wychwood apparently treasures her independence. It is this that has caused her to leave the bosom of her family and set up a household by herself. But has she really achieved her aim? She has chosen Bath as her new home, and yet Bath is the one place in Regency England that is easily accessible from Twynham Park, where Sir Geoffrey and Lady Wychwood are on hand, 24 hours a day, to bail her out of any trouble that she might find herself in. Had she really wanted to establish her independence, why did Miss Wychwood not move to London - I understand that Hans Town is quite the coming location - or perhaps Harrogate? It is, I think, more likely that she merely wished to play at independence, afraid to venture far from the security of her family home.

Claims of independence are further undermined by her decision to have Miss Farlow within her household. Nicholas Culpeper has nothing to say of Maria Farlow, but such admirable reticence is hardly reciprocated. Miss Farlow makes it very plain that she is "not at all partial to herbs, except for a little parsley in a sauce." Indeed she goes on to add that she has "never been able to understand how anyone, even a Biblical person, could possibly live on herbs." For her, Annis and her ways must surely be a bitter pill to swallow.

Her alleged desire for freedom does nothing to prevent Miss Wychwood from sweeping up any passing waif or stray that she finds in her path and carrying them off to Camden Place to give her an occupation for her idle hours. Not even explicit advice from the parents, aunts, uncles or guardians of these abductees that she is simply not a fit person to cling on to them can persuade her that if she wishes to surround herself with young people, Miss Susan Wychwood and Master Tom Wychwood would be far more suitable accessories.

While the weather remains fine, Miss Wychwood can continue to fool the more susceptible, including perhaps herself, that she has acheived a measure of freedom, if only of the most solipsistic sort, but as soon as the weather takes a turn for the worse, we are presented witha very different picture.

A few days of rain, and Miss Wychwood takes to her bed, claiming that she has the influenza. Faced with a headache and a few snuffles, any gentleman would treat himself by the self-administration of a bruising ride with the local hunt followed by a couple of bottles of one of the better Ports from the cellar, without bothering the local doctor. This independent approach will not do for Miss Wychwood. She must instead take to her bed for several days, with a Doctor on call and her poor maid forced to keep watch over her day and night, and then, when finally persuaded that she is not really all that ill, she must throw herself at the first man that asks after her, careless of his reputation as a rake, and insist on nothing short of marriage. Independence? I think not.

The last word on Miss Wychwood I shall leave to Amabel, Lady Wychwood, who says of her sister-in-law,

If you don't stop talking such nonsense I shall be strongly tempted to slap you!

There are times, I believe, when temptation should not be resisted.

Technorati Tags: heyeroines

2006-01-09T20:24:00.000Z

This slapping business is catching on. The Romantic Novelists' Association have just launched a new questionnaire in the run up to Valentine's Day, and the question they are asking is

Which heroine would you most like to slap?

The options are:

Catherine Linton from Wuthering Heights;
Scarlett O'Hara from Gone With The Wind;
Bridget Jones from, er, Bridget Jones' Diary;
Arwen Evenstar (surely "Undomiel") from Lord of the Rings;
Fanny Price from Mansfield Park; and
the unnamed second Mrs de Winter from Rebecca.

It would be unethical for me to reveal where the Wenlock vote went, although I will say that one response to "tomorrow is another day" might be "for you, not necessarily".

Let's get voting.

2006-01-08T23:35:00.000Z

See Wenlock live on stage...

Well, sort of. I will be taking part in a special Valentine's Day debate at Upminster Public Library. Roger Sanderson and I will be proposing the motion that "Men are as Romantic as Women". Katie Fforde and Elizabeth Lord will be opposing it. Tickets are £4.00, and further details are available from Havering Live.

2006-01-07T18:29:00.000Z

Heyeroines in need of a slap

16. Hester Theale (Sprig Muslin)

Among the many reasons postulated for the peculiar nature of Regency society (making morning calls in the afternoon, watering one's dresses, eating turtles, high-perch phaetons, the whole reticule business, you know what I mean), one that has, I believe, received far too little attention is the fact that in the early Nineteenth Century there was no such thing as day-time television (or indeed any remotely close equivalent achievable through the technology available at the time - circulating libraries simply cannot be considered sufficient substitute).

Why should this be a problem? Because without day-time television Regency society cannot have supported a sufficient number of popular psychologists, and without popular psychologists there could be no pop psychology, and without pop psychology our heyeroes and heyeroines would have had no way of understanding their need for closure, say, or any real understanding that yes, they were worth it. Without that regular infusion of platitudes wrapped up in psychobabble they could never understand that all their problems stemmed from the fact that they genuinely were different from everybody else; that they simply had not met their soulmate; that they needed positive affirmations; or that they were, perhaps through no real fault of their own, dangerously and destructively passive-aggressive.

Which brings me neatly to Lady Hester Theale. I have no wish to dwell on the fact that she never took, that she had no countenance, nor the least degree of modishness. We should completely ignore any suggestion, however well founded, that she is stupidly shy and dowdy. Her slightly myopic gaze and her reputation for dullness need not detain us. All we are interested in is the inner Hester, the potentially worthwhile and possibly even genuinely "good" person underneath all those layers. The only question we should ask is "does she show signs of being passive-aggressive?" And the only answer we can entertain is "yes".

Let us consider the evidence. Since the death of her dear mama Lady Hester has remained quiet - perhaps too quiet. Her father's heir now lives at Brancaster, complete with a wife who is ideally placed to be the châtelaine of the family seat, and yet Hester has done nothing about moving out. She has just remained in place, quietly, resolutely, and, had her poor family only understood the concept - indeed if only the concept had been cooked up at the time - classically passively-aggressively.

And then Sir Gareth Ludlow turns up, the tragic death of Clarissa Lincombe still, after many years, haunting him. Of course Lady Hester does not recognise that what Sir Gareth needs is closure. She doesn't recognise this in part because that particular piece of psychocobblers had yet to be invented, but also because she is protected from such sensibility by the wall of passive aggression that she has constructed around herself.

When offered the opportunity to marry a handsome and, let us not beat about the bush, eligible young man such as Sir Gareth (even if he does happen to arrive with a regular out-and-outer in tow) a normal reaction might be to faint dead away, to rush from the room wearing an expression of shock, or else to say "yes." Lady Hester's reaction is to turn him down, not forcefully, not with any explanation, but simply with an otherwise unelaborated upon observation that marraige to Sir Gareth would be "anguish". Classic passive aggressivity, I am sure you would agree.

Lady Hester compounds her passive aggression with repeated attempts to force upon Sir Gareth some sort of cute and fluffy animal: perhaps one of Juno's puppies, or else a kitten saved from drowning. What could be a more sterotypically passive-aggressive act. The gift of the animal is almost an explicit declaration that the giver sees herself as unbiddable (albeit probably house-trained, unlike the puppy or kitten).

And it is not just the blanking of Sir Gareth's proposal. The unresponsive acquiescence to Sir Gareth's request that Lady Hester attend to Miss Summercourt; the silent treatment of the maid, Povey; the dismissive attitude towards Mrs Chicklade; all are further indications that Lady Hester has learned to get her way not by being a "joiner" or "team-player", or through reaffirmation of her own self-worth, or any other tool from the armory of the Positive Person, but by means of a prolonged and uncommunicative sulk.

Never mind that the delightfully unprepossessing Mr Whyteleaf has his future preferment to consider; never mind that Lord Widmore has his position in society and a seat in the House of Lords ahead of him; never mind that Sir Gareth could do a great deal better for himself by marrying Miss Stockwell; Lady Hester simply stands there, unmoved and unmoving, using the silent treatment to get her way. And in the end she succeeds. Just as the endless dripping of water will eventually erode a marble block, Lady Hester's oppressive meekness eventually wears away all resisitance and even Sir Gareth, weakened by an unfortunate bullet, and as a rsult subject to these wearyingly prolonged silences through all his waking hours, and no doubt some of his sleeping ones, while he recuperates at the Bull Inn, succumbs at the end.

With Lady Hester apparently shy and unexplaining to the last, her passive aggression, unrecognised for the sociopathic disorder that we now so clearly see it to be, claims another victim.

Technorati Tags: heyeroines

2006-01-06T21:52:00.000Z

I have been rooting around in Paterson's Roads some more. The 14th edition, from 1808, has a number of improvements over the 11th. Paterson particularly points out that it has been

arranged upon a new and more convenient Plan: so that the Routes and the Seats relating to them are brought under the Eye in the same page.

I am more taken by the fact that he now gives the names of the coaching inn or inns at the various post towns. I also welcome Paterson's collaboration with the Post Office, which has led to the inclusion of a table of principal towns, giving the time of arrival and departure of the mail.

Since the mail was the fastest service on the roads, by plotting the time of the mail along a route we can get some idea of the shortest possible journey times. Unfortunately the one detail that Paterson leaves out is the time the mails arrive and depart from London. No matter, revisiting the journey to Cheltenham we can get some idea of what went on. Here are the times given by Paterson:

Post Town	arrival	departure
Southall	10 p.m.	4 a.m.
Uxbridge	10-40 p.m.	3-50 a.m.
Wycombe	Midnight	1 a.m.
Stoken Church	1-30 a.m.	11-20 p.m.
Tetsworth	2-20 a.m.	11 p.m.
Oxford	4 a.m.	10 p.m.
Witney	6 a.m.	7 p.m.
Burford	7 a.m.	6 p.m.
Frogmill	10 a.m.	5 p.m.
Cheltenham	11 a.m.	4 p.m.

I would guess that the post left London an hour before it arrived in Southall, and arrived back an hour after leaving there on the inbound journey, giving a journey time of 14 hours out and 13 hours back. For that speed of service you would have paid 8d for a letter consisting of a single sheet of paper.

Paterson also provides a table which can be used to calculate the cost of a pair of post horses for any distance from 5 to 20 miles, at rates of from 12d to 18d per mile. Posting down to Cheltenham by the route given in my earlier post would cost between £4-12s-6d and £6-18s-9d for horses alone if one started at Tyburn Turnpike. Add to that the cost of refreshment along the way, and the various emoluments that you would need to furnish to postillions and inn servants, and long-distance travel starts looking an expensive proposition.

2006-01-05T22:41:00.000Z

I had an e-mail today from the Agency that is looking at Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth. It said:

[We have now] read the complete manuscript of LORD ALEXANDER'S CIPHER. We are in agreement that it has good potential, and has many of the right 'ingredients', but is still in need of work.

I suggest that, if you are willing, we meet soon to discuss things in detail.

I am not sure what Miss Snark would make of it, but I reckon that this is more of a "yes" than a "no". This is my first novel, after all. I would be suspicious if an agent suggested that it didn't need work.

With the post-Christmas backlog the meeting won't be for a couple of weeks. I am not counting chickens, but I am counting the days.

2006-01-04T19:01:00.000Z

Following a suggestion from Jen Kloester, author of Georgette Heyer's Regency World, I have just laid my hands on a copy of Paterson's Roads, which is a wonderful little book.

Paterson's Roads describes itself as "a new and accurate description of all the direct and principal cross roads in England and Wales." It lists all the cities, towns and "remarkable villages" in the country, arranged by the roads a traveller must take to get to each of them. My copy is of the 11th edition, from 1796. It cost three shillings when new (sewn but unbound), but I had to pay a little more than that. However, as a research tool it will be, I think, invaluable.

Suppose we wished to post down to Cheltenham from London. What route should we take, and where would we change horses?

Looking up Cheltenham in the index, we establish that it is in Gloucestershire, that market day is Thursday, and that the route is given on page 93. Turning to page 93 we discover that the route is only given from Northlech (Northleach), but the route to Northlech is on page 82.

The route gives the various villages through which we pass, with mileage between each, and cumulative mileage. Post-towns or stages are given in italics, principal towns in capitals. Combining the details on the two pages, our route, which starts from the Tyburn Turnpike (now Marble Arch) looks like this:

To Bayswater, Mid.	-	1
Kensington Gravel-Pits	1	2
Shepherd's Bush	1½	3½
Acton	1½	5
Hanwell	3	8
Southall	1¼	9¼
Hayes	4	13¼
Hillingdon	¾	14
Uxbridge	1	15
Gerard's Cross, Bucks.	5	20
Beaconsfield	3	23
Low Water	4	27
High Wycombe	2	29
West Wycombe	2	31
Stoken Church, Oxf.	5	36
Tetsworth	6¼	42¼
Wheatley Bridge	5¾	48
At 48¾ l, to Wheatley	1	49
Shotover Hill	3	52
OXFORD	2	54
Eynsham	5	59
Witney	5	64
Burford	7	71
Northlech, Glo.	9	80
Frogmill	7	87
At ½ Mile from Frogmill turn to the r. to Dowdeswell	1½	88½
Cheltenham	4	92½

I'm not sure whether we would use the stage at Dowdeswell if we were finishing our journey at Cheltenham, but in any case this journey involves six changes, which would presumably have been at roughly two-hour intervals, making this more than a day's journey in all but the best conditions.

Paterson's Roads also gives an account of the "remarkable seats" that are near the road. On the way to Cheltenham we would pass two dozen such places including Bulstrode House and Park, owned by the Duke of Portland; Headington-House, home of W. Jackson Esq; and even West Wycombe Church, "on the tower of which is a Ball that will contain six People, and may be seen from a little beyond Beaconsfield".

A quick look at Abe suggests that there are a number of later editions available - particularly the 18th, from 1828. The 1808 edition is apparently available on CD-ROM from GenFair.

No traveller should be without a copy.

2006-01-03T22:10:00.000Z

Heyeroines in need of a slap

15. Mary Challoner (Devil's Cub)

It is a sadly unavoidable outcome of being born of a mésalliance between a headstrong young gentleman and the sister of one Mr Henry Simpkins that one is condemned to be indisputably bourgeoise. Indisputably, yes, but not inescapably. There is more than one way for a young woman possessing the right qualities to scramble out of the miasmic mêlée of the middle classes and to take her place among the Quality. Indeed there are two.

The simplest route is that charted out by the Gunning sisters, and understandably considered by the former Miss Clara Simpkins worthy of emulation by her daughter Sophia. One simply has to achieve very great beauty: golden ringlets, perhaps; eyes of cornflower blue; smiles and dimples in all the right places. Combine this with a fanatical devotion to the pursuit of a title, and success can hardly be far away. Sadly for our heyeroine, even a delightfully straight nose and a short upper lip cannot compensate for curls of a mere chestnut hue, and eyes that will not be shifted from a disappointing grey.

For Miss Challoner, therefore, Route One is out of the question. There remains, however, Route Two: achieve impeccable ton.

Frankly, how hard can it be? This is 1780 after all, and it is considered good ton for a man to wear a jacket of yellow velvet with satin trousers, or indeed to dress himself in a velvet suit dyed to the colour of blood-engorged fleas. It is acceptable, even in mixed company, to say "Ecod", "La", or even "'Pon Rep". Macaroni means style, rather than comfort food. And Lady Mary Coke, whoever she may be, is still considered a figure of fun. Against such a background Miss Challoner, who, we are led to believe, is a determined and resourceful young woman, surely will not find it hard to keep her nose clean, her address demure, and her manners appropriate. Let us see.

We might start with her reaction to the letter from Vidal. Does Miss Challoner know who sent it? Yes. Does she know who the intended recipient is? Yes. Does she open it anyway? Yes. The argument that it was addressed to "Miss Challoner", and therefore to her, is special pleading of the most egregiously casuistical sort. It will not wash. Bad ton.

Next we must review Miss Challoner's decision to invite herself along on an abduction. She had her reasons, no doubt, but she was hardly open about them. It is bad enough to impose oneself on an unwitting abductor. It is still worse to do so in disguise. It is even worse when that disguise is a loo mask stolen from the very sister whose place in the abduction one is trying to usurp. Very bad ton.

Barely half-a-dozen chapters in, and already Miss Challoner's ideas of ton are showing a distinct peccability. However, all is not lost, and quick thinking, combined with resolute action, may still be enough to save the day.

Shooting unarmed noblemen might not however be quite the way to go. Particularly shooting them with one of their own pistols. A pistol that Miss Challoner helped herself to without asking any sort of permission. Bad, bad ton.

At this point the reader is forced to agree with Vidal that even a career in millinery is becoming out of the question. The market for hats that might well have been knocked together from stolen fancy dress accessories and deadly weaponry was decidely small in 1780 (although, ten years later, one might argue that they would have a certain attraction for some of Paris' more radical fashionistas. This does not, however, serve to help our heyeroine, but surely she has learned her lesson. Whatever else she does, she is not likely to arrange to be abducted once again, nor to assault her abductor in anyway.

Except that she does. Not content with the distinctly poor ton of having herself abducted to paris by a Marquis, she determines to have herself abducted from Paris by a mere commoner. And not just from Paris, but to Dijon. Dijon? Frightfully bad ton.

And once in Dijon we have the duel. Watching such an event, in France - even in Dijon - is possibly not, of itself, bad ton, provided one behaves with appropriate decorum. What one does not do is attempt to add to the frivolity of the occasion by tossing the combatants' coats into the fray. Quite apart from the danger - a flapping sleeve or a dragging coattail could cause one of the duellists to slip and twist a knee - there is the distinct likelihood of one or both of the coats being damaged, and trying to do invisible mending on yellow velvet is extraordinarily difficult. Appalling ton.

Somehow, despite all this, our beloved authoress deigns to forgive Miss Challoner, and to award her the hand of an admittedly deeply disfunctional Marquis. Normally this would be enough for me to forgive her too. However there is one feature of Miss Challoner's behaviour, one that I have hitherto allowed to pass unremarked, that makes this very, very hard.

I refer of course to what happened during the channel crossing. It is not the actual event on the boat. Not the most tonnish of behaviours I grant you, but not without a certain justification. No, it's not that. It is instead Miss Challoner's utter determination to tell anybody and everybody she meets all about it. Servants, gentlemen callers, complete strangers that she meets in remote coaching inns. No self-pitying account of Miss Challoner's woeful situation is complete without a blow by blow account of her tossing her cookies on a cross-channel yacht. She wants Comyn to abduct her - she tells him exactly what happened when she threw up. She is invited to dine with an unfamiliar Duke in the isolated settlement of Pont-de-Moine - she describes her recent emesis in excrutiating detail and wonders why he is not laughing along with her.

If Miss Challoner is ever to get to grips with what makes for good ton then the first thing that she must learn is that however natural, however life-enhancing, however pleasurable certain involuntary bodily functions may be, one simply doesn't talk about them. And even if one does, there are possibly better euphemisms than "throwing up into milord's basin".

Technorati Tags: heyeroines

2005-12-27T17:02:00.000Z

Heyeroines in need of a slap

14. Drusilla Morville (The Quiet Gentleman)

For any person of refined sensibility it must come as something of a shock to find someone like Drusilla Morville comfortably settled in to the opening passage of a Heyer story. Seeing the daughter of a Free Thinker and, of all the unsuitable occupations for a mother, a novelist, usurping the position that should be held by a peerless beauty, or at the very least, a considerable heiress, is enough to make one suspect foul play. As things turn out, however, we are faced with much, much worse.

By prosing on and on about her oh-so-radical parents, and by pretending not to understand the Dowager Countess's shafts of admittedly somewhat artless wit, and by repeatedly insisting on how short, fat and unromantic she herself is, Miss Morville manages to exclude the so much more suitable Miss Bolderwood (who is undoubtedly, it should be noted, not merely taller, thinner and more romantic, but also both a peerless beauty and a considerable heiress) from the action until well into Chapter Four. Past experience tells us that this is a position within the story arc from which, despite her Heroic efforts (that is to say, despite doing her best to look lost but kittenish by the side of the road), there is no serious prospect of her ever finding her way back into contention. The only option left open to Marianne is foul play, something that would surely never be considered by one so tall, thin, romantic, beautiful and, let us not forget, so well-endowed as Miss Bolderwood. How very different from Drusilla.

For now the real mystery begins. Once Miss Morville has insinuated herself, viper-like, into the very bosom of our tale, what is she planning to do with her advantageous situation? Obviously she isn't planning to marry the Earl of St Erth: such a romantic - indeed reactionary - idea must clearly be out of the question for the daughter of that scourge of both orthodoxy and orthography, Mr ~~Harvey~~ Hervey Morville, and his wife, scourge of both Coleridges, Cordelia Consett. And so it proves. Drusilla's aim is not true love, but treachery; not romance but republicanism.

Her objective is, shockingly (but, given her family background, unsurprisingly), the destruction of the entire British aristocracy, one family at a time, and on this occasion the family under threat is the Frants. Miss Morville's audacious scheme involves setting the only three male members of the Frant family against each other. Her plan is to murder the Earl in a way that, to the untutored eye, appears to be at the hand of his half-brother but which to the somewhat-more-but-still-not-quite-sufficiently tutored eye points towards his cousin. You may have thought that Theo was misdirecting you to believe that Martin was the would-be murderer; I suggest that the truth is utterly otherwise: Miss Morville was misdirecting you to believe that Theo was misdirecting you to believe that Martin was the murderer.

And the worst of it is that we cannot be sure that Miss Morville does not succeed. We leave the narrative at a critical juncture, with the Earl carrying Drusilla, who is apparently suffering from a broken arm, up the main stairs of Stanyon Castle. We are never, ever, told whether St Erth ever came down those stairs again.

On a more cheerful note, the langour that went missing in Regency Buck turns up at the very start of Chapter 12 of The Quiet Gentleman, having apparently made a home for itself in the dining room chandelier at Stanyon.

Technorati Tags: heyeroines

2005-12-24T19:21:00.000Z

May I just wish all my readers a suitably self-indulgent Christmas, and my best wishes for an elegant and sophisticated New Year.

2005-12-23T20:15:00.000Z

In the end I had a slight change of plan, and only sent my two-chapters-and-a-synopsis of Lord Alexander's Cipher; or, the Bridekirk Behemoth to one agent as an trial attempt. This was to my first choice agency - first choice for various reasons, to do with both the clients that they represent, and the fact that I had met them, and we got on OK (and that makes it so much easier to do a query letter). So the package went into the post, and they said that they would be back in touch within four weeks.

They came back in about four days, to ask to see the rest of it.

An instant combination of elation and panic. Elation for the obvious reason; panic because I hadn't checked the rest of the typescript as thoroughly as I might have done, and I knew that there was some work needed doing. Luckily my employers were understanding and allowed me to take some leave at very short notice and I scrubbed through chapters 3 to 11 as thoroughly as I could. Out went a couple of thousand words, in came about six thousand more. Names were changed to protect the guilty (me - I had called the great man "Wellington" in the early spring of 1809, when he was still General Wellesley). There is a limit to how much better one can make a draft in a day and a half, but I think that it was improved.

With the Christmas post what it is, and the agent being not too far away, I biked the package over to the agent this afternoon, had a very pleasant chat, and came home feeling really rather optimistic. They'll get back to me in a couple of weeks, which leaves me time to work on the various Christmas Quizzes that I have picked up about the place, to read plenty, and perhaps to make a start on Lady Cardington's Folly; or, the Limehouse Leviathan.

There may even be time to run the rule over one or two more heyeroines.