Babes in RegencyLand
Most of us have a guilty pleasure, something we like to do that we don’t necessarily think is the most productive thing, but it’s pleasant and relaxing and, God willing, not actually a vice.
For me, it is reading Regency romances.
When I was young, I read everything, but my favorite kind of stories were fantasy and science fiction. But when I became a fantasy writer, I found it harder and harder to read fantasy for pleasure. My mind would get caught up in evaluating how the world-building was done or some other aspect of the story. After a while, reading fantasy began to feel like work.
I enjoy mysteries. I read a lot of them when I was young. But two things happened:
I got better and better at figuring them out.
I am not going to say I can figure them all out. I cannot. But I often figure them out. This doesn’t interfere with my enjoyment of the story—I like figuring them out—but it does mean that my mind is always working when I am reading a mystery, so it isn’t something I want to do if I happen to have a quiet evening or a few minutes to read by the pool.
(Do not be deceived. I NEVER have a few minutes to read by the pool…but it has been a dream of mine, for decades, that, someday, I might.)Mysteries got more and more gruesome.
There are probably sweeter ones out there. But a lot of the ones I’ve read since I grew up felt that they had to have shocking crimes with graphic descriptions. And I just don’t want to face that when I have an evening to myself.
So I found myself turning to romance, particularly historical romances, which have some of the charm of a fantasy novel, as they can also sweep us away to another place and time.
After a period where I read any historical romance at all, I found myself focusing upon Regency romances. They seemed to me to offer the perfect mix between a world we understood and the rigid rules of past society that offered structure to the plot.
Earlier than the Regency, and one is in danger of the story feeling more like a history, much later and the social rules loosen, removing of the nostalgic charm.
I even tried to write one once. I wrote nearly a whole book, though it was set in 1882, not in the Regency period—the time of the Buccaneers (a group of rich American heiresses who took England by storm and married impoverished British gentry and lords.) It was called The Audacity of Her and followed the life of American heiress Rosalynd Franklyn, who marries the Earl of Howard and finds herself living in the unfamiliar world of the British aristocracy, for which she was ill-suited.
Lost and alone, the story began with her trying to concoct a love potion so that she could fall in love with her own husband. (This was not a fantasy, just a story where people were superstitious. By the end, she and her husband did fall in love, but not due to magic. ;-)
The book opened:
“On Midsummer's Night, at full moon, I walked backward—blindfolded—through my husband's garden and gathered two handfuls of rose petals in accordance with your instructions.”
I am going to borrow this idea for a minor character in my upcoming Regency of the Wise.
Regency romances are quite popular. Jane Austen wrote in this period—though it was contemporary to her. Georgette Heyer popularized the Regency Romance, and soon it became a genre of its own. Other Regency authors whose work I particularly enjoy include Marion Chesney and my favorite, Mary Balogh. Recently, I have also become fond of Rachel Knowles, but more on that later.
More recently, the Bridgerton TV show has brought new fans to the era.
Some time ago, I decided it would be fun to write in the Regency of the Wise—the world of The Books of Unexpected Enlightment. As it will be some time before I can release the next Rachel Griffin book, since I want to write her entire Sophomore year, and then rapid-release the books over a single year of real-time, I thought it might be nice to have something to come out in the meantime. So I thought this might be a good time to toss off a few light romances.
Of course, it is not working out quite the way I expected, but that is another story entirely.
As I delved into the history of the Regency period in my effort to decide what to change to fit the World of the Wise and what to keep, I discovered something fascinating.
Most Regency romances I have read—and I have read a LOT of them over the years—don’t take place in the early 1800s. They take place in what I have dubbed Regencyland, a place that resembles early 19th-century England in some ways but does not resemble it at all in other ways.
What is more, I have discovered that some romances set in that time period take place in what I will call Historical Regency—they are historical novels set in Regency, England.
A Historical Regency romance is a love story set in a historically accurate (within reason) early 1800s England. Often, the romance itself does not have quite the zing often found in a Regencyland romance. The people are a bit more realistic, but this can be tremendously refreshing.
Regencyland, on the other hand, seems to be a mix of Regency London society and 1700s, or even 1600s Britain.
Why do I say that?
I have read dozens of Regencies where people have gone galavanting all over England and never once has anyone mentioned a smokestack.
By 1800, nearly every larger town in England had at least one coal-burning, steam-powered loom or factory of some other sort. Tall smokestacks, belching black smoke, dotted the landscape. There was so much smoke in London itself, from all the factories in the City, that in the winter there were days when you could hardly see ten feet before you—the famous pea-soup thick London Fog—but I cannot think of a single romance I have read where anyone mentioned the fog. Not even once.
So, while the social whirl, the customs, the mens’ clubs, such as Whites, and the assembly rooms, such as Almack’s, are all correct for the era, the rest of Britain seems to be frozen in the early 1700s, before the start of the industrial revolution.
And that is just one example of ways in which Regencyland differs from historical 1800s England.
For another example, in all the Regencyland books I have read, I don’t think a single element of the following paragraph has ever been mentioned, except, perhaps, dirty children. No mention of the fact that there was a street called The Strand or Fleet Street or that they were one and the same that met at Temple Bar, or that the walls had handwritten advertisements, or that milk might be sold out of wooden buckets carried on a yoke. Nor even a mention that London was divided into Town, where the well-to-do lived, and the City, where the business took place. (British people might all know this and take it for granted, but Americans don’t.)
The trip took them out of Town and into the City, with Vivian pointing out the arch at Temple Bar where The Strand became Fleet Street. To either side, shops lined the road, with handwritten advertisements covering every available blank wall, offering the best umbrellas, the most beautiful gowns, the most accurate pocket watches. And everything, everywhere, was dark with soot—the buildings, the granite blocks of the road, the children hawking flowers or broadsides or milk out of wooden buckets carried on a yoke.
The difference between Historic Regency and Regencyland is rather like the difference between hard sf and space opera—with one exception.
The readers who like hard sf tend to be science buffs who know the real science. But fans of Regency England often think of themselves as history buffs—however, they have often gotten their knowledge of the period from reading Regency romances, with the result that one hears rumors that those who write in Historic Regency are sometimes “corrected” by fans, who have accepted as historical fact some detail that commonly appears in Regencyland.
What is interesting to me is: both kinds of books are perfectly enjoyable to read.
I love Regencyland books. One reason Regencyland books are so delightful is that many of the tropes there exist because the authors have sussed out exactly what gives a romance zing The reason that the hero is almost always a duke or an earl is that power is attractive in a man.
My favorite Regencyland romance is Slightly Dangerous, by Mary Balogh (though I have no idea if it would be as good if one had not just read the previous books in the series that built up the personality of the hero.) Oddly, I am not alone. I have found other readers online who list this particular book, of the literally thousands, possibly millions out there, as their favorite.
For Historical Regency books, my favorite author is Rachel Knowles. She is a historian as well as an author, and does such a charming job of writing historical love stories set in this time period. Her characters are more varied, more like ordinary people, than the typical Regencyland hero and heroine. It makes her books a little bit more unexpected. While I recommend all her books, I think my favorite is A Perfect Match, which is set a couple decades earlier than the Regency period and stars the young woman who becomes the mother of some of her other heroines.
So, now you know the truth. One does not want to let on in public that one reads romances because, even today, one still gets looked down on for it.
And, strangely, no one seems to despise romance readers as much as women who read fantasy and sf...which includes most of the women I know.
But there you have it. I have admitted my guilty secret.
What is your guilty pleasure reading?
And if you happen to be a romance fan, what is your favorite romance?
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.
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.