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.

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 KansasArksey 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

• Miss Anthea Darracott
• Miss Arabella Tallant
• Miss Diana Beauleigh
• Lady Harriet Presteigne
• Miss Jenny Chawleigh
• Señorita Juana Los Delores de Leon
• Mademoiselle Léonie de Saint-Vire
• Nell Stornaway

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.