37 Comments
Sep 26Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

If you want smokestacks in your romance, or at least factories, I recommend the later novel North and South, by Elizabeth Gaskell. The daughter of a clergyman from southern England moves with her father to one of the industrial cities of northern England, where she meets a factory owner—a self-made man who has paid off his inherited debts and made his factory prosperous. The two have very different values, which play a big role in their developing relationship. Notably, it's never shown as a clash of Right and Wrong. It's an excellent novel, one that I liked almost as much as Austen or Kipling.

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They made it into an excellent miniseries too.

But that's a later period

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Sep 26Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

Certainly. But it's still romance, or at least as much so as Austen.

I don't see Austen as much like, for example, Heyer. Consider Heyer's portrayal of the heroine's wealthy merchant father in A Civil Contract as an essentially comedic figure, and Austen's portrayal of Emma's dislike of the young farmer who's attracted to Emma's protegée as a prejudice that has blinded her to his genuine merit. It seems to me that Austen is not sympathetic to the sort of condescension that Heyer later makes one of her selling points.

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Oh, definitely!

I think Heyer tries to show the view from the point of view of the characters. She has rather a range of characters, and many are treated with fun.

But yes.

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Sep 23Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

I didn’t realize the historical Regency period was that late. The Pride and Prejudice movie (that had Colin Firth) made me THINK it was set in the 1750’s or so. And I never thought it was completely unfaithful to the book (though didn’t apply the same standards as I would to, say…Lord of the Rings). No smokestacks, no trains, nothing about Napoleon etc even alluded to.

Learn something new every day, I guess. And definitely excited to read about how that works in the World of the Wise.

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Sep 24Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

Commercial steam railroading seems to have started with the Manchester and Liverpool in 1830, rather after the Regency.

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Yeah, no railroads during this period. Just things like steam-powered looms, etc.

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But that was one of my classmate's main complaints about Austen in college...that she writes during the Napoleonic war, but only mentions it very rarely...

I don't know if this was suppose to represent life at the time, or if she was trying to write something that was a bit timeless and she assumed that the war would not last forever.

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The 2005 movie put the story in the 1790s. So no Napoleon yet.

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Sep 23Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery. It's complete and total wish fulfillment romance. It's dumb but I love it and I've read it over and over.

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Oooh!

Sounds peom5!

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Sep 23Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

I have to confess that I'm rather fond of Vanity Fair, which is set in the Regency era but in spirit is perhaps an anti-romance: a satire on romance.

As for "guilty pleasures," I think I might name E.E. Smith's Lensman novels.

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:-)

I think my husband would think of lindsman novels is quite substantial!

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Sep 24Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

I certainly wouldn't say that the science is substantial! But the distinction I'm making isn't primarily one of content, I think. Rather, it's aesthetic quality vs. personal enjoyment: the distinction that lets us say "I acknowledge that it's good, but I didn't enjoy it" or "I really like this, but it's not actually well written." I don't feel that Smith has either depth of theme, depth of character, or a captivating prose style, all of which are part of my sense of what gives aesthetic quality to a work of prose fiction.

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Understood!

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Sep 25Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

While I love watching Jane Austen movies with my wife, my guilty pleasures would be Edgar Rice Borroughs (Tarzan or John Carter series) or Martha Wells' Murderbot Diaries. In fact I just went on a binge rereading Tarzan 1 through 3 and am currently reading Princess of Mars. I really enjoy Thomas King's DreadfulWater series too.

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Murderbot Diaries does sound like a perfect guilty pleasure.

I have read Tarzan. Quite enjoyable.

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Sep 24Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

Jane Austen died part way through the regency era. During her lifetime, her novels were known for their intense realism, to the point where some people didn't like them because they were too much like ordinary every day life and her characters too much like ordinary everyday people. She never once mentioned a smoke stack.

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Nor does she have a lot od sceens of people traveling for a lin time overland...most small towns would not have a smokestack...but a cross country trip would pass them.

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Sep 24Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

Yes, but there are so many much more interesting things that your characters can see looking out the window: corpses hung up at the crossroads, a cock fight in the village green, a public hanging, a gang of redcoats raping a farm girl (if you set your novel in the Highlands in the aftermath of Culloden), ruined crops and burnt cottages (also post Culloden Highlands. It was really nasty), East Indiamen, fishing boats and privateer frigates anchored in the bay, a goat standing on top of a tree, some awesome animal that was common then but is now all but extinct, a nightsoil cart, a milkmaid leading her cow on a string. I'm not sure that a smoke stack would be at the top of my list of things to include unless I had a reason for putting it in.

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Because they were everywhere.

Because the smokestacks, which rose above even relatively medium -sized towns, much less the cities, filling the skies with smog and smoke, were extremely common by this period... Much more so than nearly anything in the list you mentioned.

Nearly everything you mentioned, a) would have been there back in time for centuries, so while you certainly could have seen such thing, they were not particularly related to this time period unless they suited your.story, and B, the things you mentioned did occasionally occur but they were not nearly as regular or as numerous.

Smokestacks are the thing that we associate with the industrial revolution. And nobody mentions that they existed during this period.

They have been spreading for decades, and many felt they besmirched the countryside... So they would have been quite noticeable if you wee making a long trip.

Does one have to put them in? Certainly not.

If your story takes place mainly in the Town of London or in a small town, they'd never come up... (Except for the occasional pea soup fog that they were producing that did settle on London from time to time. But that's more in the winter, and the Season starts in the spring for that very reason.)

But, if you wanted your story to be historically correct, and you were writing a scene where someone was traveling over a long distance, the fact that the landscape did not look the way it would have looked fifty years earlier is the sort of thing a historical novel would make a point commenting upon, but a Regencylane novel need not.

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And yet, we come back to Austen, who wrote at the time, and never once mentioned one of your smokestacks. Even when Lizzie Bennet travelled up North with her uncle and aunt or when Fanny Price was sent back to her ghastly home in Portsmouth, or Anne Elliot was rattling around between Bath and Lyme and the shires, no one ever looked out of a carriage window and saw a smokestack. That her novels fail to be historically correct by your standards reveals a pretty big problem with your standard. Georgette Heyer, the queen of historical accuracy, also didn't feel the need to ever mention them, even in her novels set in Yorkshire (though the unknown Ajax's Grandfather had made his families fortunes out of smokestack producing industries).

It seems like you are getting very caught up on one small detail, and I'm not certain that they were as ubiquitous as you think they were. There was a lot of regional variation in the UK at the time and the big polluting industries were clustered (mining excepted) around the big industrial cities in the North (it was almost certainly how the nouveau riche Bingley's made their fortune). You wouldn't expect to see them in Cornwall say, where the economy was pilchard fishing, smuggling, china clay, tin and copper mines, and subsistence agriculture. Daphne De Maurier's heroine did not see Smokestacks out of the carriage window on her way to Jamica Inn: they probably weren't there to see, and even if they had been, the novel would have been made weaker not stronger for mentioning them, because the novel is not about the encroaching modernity aspects of its Regency setting.

Also, the idea that there are historically accurate romance novels being written today set in the regency is simply not something that I can agree with. This isn't quite my chosen time period (I set my novels 70 years earlier), but I have yet to find an author (apart from Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen, of course, neither of whom are writing today) whose work is not filled with jarring historic inaccuracies (and that includes novels written by authors who have also published info guides on the period). I have dutifully read the sample pages of everyone recommended or self described as Heyeresque and/or historically accurate in my search for just this thing, and yet all I find is jarring inaccuracies (an Anglican earl whose tutor was a Catholic priest, heroines who speak Cornish - a language that was extinct by the 1770's, an upper-class heroine who delights the servants by unexpectedly dropping in on them in the kitchen to steal biscuits, brutishly masculine men who use feminine coded slang like la and pon rep, men speaking in mixed company about things they would never mention around women) and excruciatingly bad dialogue. Your so called historically accurate romance novels look a lot like modern people with modern attitudes and values in regency garb to me, and if these authors are attempting to write something historically accurate ala Heyer and Patrick O'Brien then they are failing abysmally.

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I agree with you about Cornwall.

Nothing my research suggested that you'd see many smokestacks there. Most of it was the middle of England.

But I was still shocked by how common they were and how they appeared even in what I thought of as smaller places.

As to historical novels, the article mentions Rachel Knowles.

She's a historian of the Regency period. Her romance is offen not as compelling as the Regencyland romances, but the characters have a realistic quality to them that is refreshing, and the history is just delightful.

:

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Sep 24·edited Sep 24Liked by L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright

"Faith based romance" is not my thing so I think I'll pass on Ms Knowles. I don't know whether her faith based thing is contemporary Christian beliefs and values, or a more authentically regency era thing a la the appalling Fanny Price and Edmund Bertrand, but either way its not going to be something that I would enjoy. Well done you for finding someone whose first 5 pages only have one big glaring historical inaccuracy though. (Once an engagement was contracted, only the woman or her family could call it off. Socially it was unthinkable for a man to do so, and legally it opened him up to a very expensive breach of promise lawsuit. It is inconceivable that the heroines mother wouldn't know this. Heyer and Austen both have novels where this fact is central to the plot: the Grand Sophie and Sense and Sensibility both turn on this point).

To be honest, I have the same problem reading historical and romance novels set in this time period that you have reading sci-fi/fantasy. I cannot switch my authors brain off enough to lose myself and get immersed in it unless its very very very well done (meaning Jane Austen and the best of Georgette Heyer). Otherwise I just end up nitpicking it to death, so I may be being quite unfair to a lot of writers who other people enjoy. My solution is also the same as yours: I read a lot of sci-fi/fantasy romance writers, no doubt the same ones you describe not being able to get into.

"Reading like a writer" really is a double edged sword isn't it?

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And smokestacks are just one example of many things left out if Regencyland.

:-)

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Gah! Trying to write on a small device. Sorry for the spelling errors.

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