I have no problem with a duke, but I would politely dispute the idea that hero is who is neither a hermit nor a rake makes for a less satisfying regency romance. Exhibit A: Jane Austen, generally regarded as the best writer of regency era romance in every possible way. Neither Mr Darcy (the most romantic man in fiction), nor Mr Knightly, or Captain Wentworth were either rakes or hermits, or even titled. Exhibit B: Georgette Heyer, the queen of regency romance has many wonderful, much beloved hero's who are not rakes, hermits or titled (along with all her rakes and lords). Cotillion and Arabella are two of her most beloved novels, both staring mild rather effeminate men, titleless and modelled vaguely after Beau Brummell. If they can do it, then it can be done, even if other people have not thus far managed.
I would also note that "rake" heros in regency romances which aren't written by Heyer are almost never actual rakes (and if you do some research into actual 18th century rakes you will realize why, because these were stomach churning men who would be almost impossible to turn into hero's). Even Heyer's rakes were all very toned down. Lord Vidal (from Devil's cub) was the only one who really qualified as a real life rake, and he was the most minor end of the rake spectrum (the wild young man with too much money and too much time on his hands variety, ala the Earl of Rochester and Lord Littleton, and his modern day equivalents, young men in a rock band). Even his dear old dad, the Duke of Avon, really really really wasn't a rake by actual 18th century standards. He was just a standard 18th century man of fashion with a nasty streak. Don't get me wrong, I adore the Duke of Avon, and I think he's a marvellous creation, but he's not actually a rake.
Also, even though I have no problem with a duke, the so-called-rake and aristocrats in general have been so overused, that I can appreciate the "if I read another one, I'll scream" sentiment. They have been done to death, and there are a lot of under explored corners of the regency and 18th century that are ripe for really romantic romance novels. Pirates (if you set your novel in the early 18th century), navy officers, army officers (have your heroine follow the drum - during the Napoleonic wars, what an amazing setting), smuggling/smugglers, a black former slave from a family of witch doctors turned highwayman. There are no shortage of manly and potentially romantic men who have been badly under utilized by regency romance writers.
The hermit, in this context, means a man who has never fallen love before. A man other girls can't get
Darcy is a perfect example of that.
As to Jane Austin, I would argue that she writes committed men is coming not romances. In the closer her characters come to a hermit type, like darcy, the better the romance quality.
What makes a good normal it would makes a good romance overlap but are not exactly the same.
I've read quite a few Heywr books recently,...and the heroes were for the most part rakes like Avon or hermits... Like you want me up to hear us
Hemit in this case does that mean that they are withdrawn from society, only from what we would call dating.
Have you heard of Georgette Heyer's famous golden zone re hero's? She once wrote somewhere that a hero ideally ought to sit somewhere between Bronte's Mr Rochester and Austen's Mr Darcy in terms of how nice/good/flawed he is. If he is less flawed then Mr Darcy (ala Mr Bingley, and also Freddie from Cotillion) or more flawed then Mr Rochester (ala Heathcliffe, Lord Vidal and the Duke of Avon) then they were not ideal hero material. One thing that is quite noticeable about Heyer's hero's is how they changed over time. Andover, Vidal and Avon were all written early in her career (before she turned 25), and they all got steadily less rakish over time.
She also said quite often, that she was sick to death of writing about aristocrats behaving badly and longed to write about people who were more middle class but her audience was so enamored of her pseudo rakes and aristocrats that she didn't dare.
There are many kinds of novels with love stories beyond the category romance, so to speak, but she did them so well that this was her readers asked for.
This may be why her stories got a bit simpler over time (compare, say, Regency Buck with Sprig Muslin)
I've actually been planning to write an article just on her books and some of the differences over time.
Even though the pseudo-rake and the aristocratic hero have been done to death and I am not very interested in reading about them unless the author can find something fresh to say (or does it very very well), if you do wander too far away from the rest of the flock in regards to who you make your hero and heroine and the story you chose to tell about them (tropes etc), you are likely to discover that you are no longer part of the genre that you think you are, and then you get into difficulty marketing your work unless you already have an established audience you can take with you.
Considering that it was pretty clear that Tracy had raped other women and was planning to rape the one who wasn't called Jenifer (her name in that book will come back to me in a moment. Diana?), I think it is pretty clear he was a real rake.
Bit the word was legitimately used, even at the time, for men who seduced women and didn't plan to marry....even if they didn't qualify for the Rakehell Club.
Like I said, read about the lives of the famous actual rakes. You will be horrified and you will change your mind. Also, Tracey Andover wasn't a Heyer hero, and you can't just give Avon his history, because in the end he was a different character with a different and considerably watered down history. Frankly, I suspect that the reason she did end up changing all the names was because Andover's history/behavior was too troubling for her to be able to sell him as a hero. Also, the standard for being a rake was higher then attending Sir Francis Dashwoods orgies, not lower. Some of your founding father's attended them, but they were not rakes. These were really really really bad men, men who would make you throw up in your mouth.
The thing is that just like the eligible duke is a fictional convention, the Regency romance rake is a fictional convention. If a man is a rake by the standards of modern day Regency romance readers, he's a rake in a Regency romance.
But Avon claims Tracy past His reference ate the things that happened, like him kidnapping Jennifer, show that he's supposed to be that character, and worse. She' invents additional bad background things for him that don't even show up if Tracy's book.
And, as I said, there were lots of men who are considered ranks who are not qualified to be members of the Rakehell Club . S
So it is not accurate to say a guy wasn't a rake just because he wasn't as bad as some of the other rates. :-)
PS - I wrote the first draft of my first novel with a Heyer style rake. (At least, that was my intention. At the end of the first draft he was very drippy and milk toast and not at all rake like and it was difficult to understand why my heroines parents objected to him so strongly). I then got around to doing my reading about actual rakes and discovered to my horror what real rakes were really like, something that made me feel physically ill. I ended up with a sinister Duke of Avon level pseudo rake, a man who my heroines parents were 100% justified in not wanting her to marry, but who was still nothing like the real thing. My learning was to do all my research before starting the novel.
What you're describing is a group of men that existed, many of them before the Regency period.
But, if you looked into it, you would find that the lesser level, the cads and boundaries, still often called rates, also existed.
Some of them appear in the books of the period
A man doesn't have to be as bad as a man can be to still be not the kind of guy a parent wants daughter to marry.
(For some reason, DeSade was quite popular when I was in college . It didn't occur to me until this conversation that maybe the general public was not familiar with him.)
I disagree. I think you haven't done enough research into how the average upper class man actually behaved in this era and how the real life rakes actually behaved. We have George Selwyn, the famous necrophile and child molester. We have Lord Byron who knocked up his sister and molested dozens of 12 year old boys. We have General Charteris, the rape master general, who raped so many working class women the he ended up sentenced to death despite being upper class, the Marquis de Sade (whose life and work is much much much worse then you imagine if you haven't attempted to read his work, which I do not recommend). You have the Earl of Rochester, a violent, drunk young man, who was a sex addict and cheated on his wife with every woman he met (but died in his late 20's, seemingly of syphilis, so may have grown out of it if he'd lived as many rock stars eventually grow out of it). You have the Earl of March/Duke of Queensberry, a (comparatively) harmless sex addict who started out as dangerously charming and ended up a gross creepy old man.
Believe me, among those who have researched rakes, my view that Vidal was the only Heyer hero who qualified is a standard conclusion. Heyer herself acknowledged freely that her rakes were extremely watered down versions of such.
Don't forget, you never get to see a rake in all of Austen's cannon. Willoughby, Wickham, Frank Churchill, Anne Elliott's cousin, Henry Crawford - these were men of poor character, but none of them were rakes.
Jimmy Saville, Jeffrey Epstein, and P Diddy are the modern equivalent of these men.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree about this one.
And I hope you're absolutely disagree with you about Avon. Because he's supposed to bhave the same past as Tracy from The Black Moth, who absolutely is a rather awful rake.
Even if you give him Tracy Andover's history, he's pretty tame by the standards of actual 18th century rakes. Read about George Selwyn, Lord Byron, General Charteris (affectionately known as "the rape master general"), and the Marquis de Sade. These men are despicable hard core sex offenders. No one who appears in Heyer, even as a villain, comes anywhere close. There are other categories, the sex addict (the Earl of Sandwich, the Earl of March/Duke of Queensberry, the Earl of Rochester), and wild drunk young bad boy (once again the Earl of Rochester, Lord Littleton), but he doesn't fit those patterns either. I'm afraid that by the extremely low standards of upper class 18th century men, the Duke of Avon's just not bad enough.
The problem is that these statistics are in tension with the notion that this is really taking place in the historical era. It can interfere with suspension of disbelief.
It is far from the worst offender in that respect. Part of the general problem of historical fiction is that they tend to congregate about periods. So you get so many featuring Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Stephan, Maud, and Matilda in the Anarchy, or all the royals in the War of the Roses, and each book ascribes to each historical figure such a character as fits the book's plot, and they are not miscible. Consciously thinking them as separate fictions means you are thinking of them as fictions. (Mind you, my issue with the War of Roses was compounded by my reading books set there before I learned there were two times a King Richard was overthrown by a Henry.)
I don't know about that. If you read actual histories, you will also find multiple incompatible accounts of the people in them. A good friend of mine likes to point to Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine as showing how Socrates was seen by Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon to account for their thoroughly dissimilar portrayals of him. One might say the same about many other historical figures.
Yes, but in that case, insofar as the accounts conflict, at most one is right. Possibly all are wrong. (True, they may present different aspects that are brought about by different situations, but that's not the issue in the novels where the situations are too similar.)
Incompatible accounts would work fine if the character were off-stage, and other characters talked about him. With the character on-stage, displaying the actual character, and possibly even letting us into the character's very thoughts, there is a realism of presentation that means that we know one of the fictional versions is wrong, and it can grate. (Not for all readers. But for some of us.)
I read two historical fiction novels about the Crusader sack of Byzantium in 1204. Both prominently featured the Empress Euphrosyne. One made her a “termagant” while the other made her a nymphomaniac. It brought home the fact that neither of them really knew what she was like.
I don't find it a problem, as long as I don't stop to try to mentally compare it with the other books in my head at the time.
Even as a child I understood the idea this is this author's version of King so and so and this other book is this other author's version of King so and so.
So I never think about another Duke I've read about in a different Regency when I'm reading Regency....unless the other book was by the same author, which case I often like if there's a brief reference to her other characters. Makes her stuff seem more realistic.
Mortality rates were exceedingly high in that day. Notice how Jane Austen causally kills off Mrs. Eliot in *Persuasion* so that Mr. Eliot is free to marry again, without any concern that this will rouse sympathy for him.
A young duke was far more plausible than nowadays.
I think that was the problem Maria Bertram encountered in Mansfield Park. Her fat stupid fiancé was worth 12,000 pounds a year, and men worth 12,000 pounds a year didn't grow on tree's, even if they were fat and stupid and didn't have a title.
I've heard people moan and groan so much about tropes but, like you said, never stop to think why these tropes exist in the first place. One author I know of in particular does this all the time - writes blog post after blog post tearing into tropes, how boring they are, talking about how they are tired and want something different.....then when they describe their next work, its still filled with the same tropes! Sadly? They think they are doing it differently, too! "I turned the trop 90 degrees or 180 degrees so it's not the trope anymore!" Except....yes, sorry, it is still the trope.....
I really think the best thing to do is to just think of it like a story and 'what would they do' and not take any concern about whether someone else is written it that way before.
IWhen I first wanted to be a writer, I used to really worry about that, was I being original?
The n, in French class in college, .we.translated Pascal's penses.
And one of them said, nothing's written until I write it.
I took that to heart. I decided that our point of view, or unique way of looking at something, is what differs from one writer from another. So twe should explore and enjoy that and not worry about getting a new plot or a new type of character or something that's nigh impossible.
Great article! I've been a Georgette Heyer fan since I was a teenager, and I have yet to find an author of her calibre in any of the regency romances I've read in the past 50 years.
If such an author exists, please let me know!
I still own a few paperbacks, and I continue to reread them every other decade or so. I never read the murder mysteries, though. Not my thing.
I always thought it was a shame Obi Wan Kenobi’s love in the prequels had to end in tragedy. He’s not exactly showy, over-the-top masculine, but you can probably see why he’d be attractive, and getting through his vow of celibacy/non attachment had to be an achievement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMpSZKld1dY
I’m not a big fan of the prequel era and still hold that the only good parts came from EU writers who loved the franchise doing their best to make Lucas’ ideas from the movies work. I much prefer the early EU writers’ speculations about the Clone Wars and before. Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambly was very intriguing
I just read the piece you reference ("how accurate does a historical romance have to be"), and I have to say, her sentiments reflect mine. The reason that the only novels that are viewed as part of the regency romance cannon that I read are Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen is because of the lack of historical accuracy, the failure to enter into the spirit of the time period, the bad writing, and the endless unimaginative identikit plots. Obviously, there are a lot of people who do like the fare which modern regency romance writers are putting out, because the genre sells really well, but there are also a lot of people like me out there who love Austen and Heyer and are hungry for more well researched, well written, romance novels set in the 18th and early 19th century, ones that really do have sparkling dialogue and well drawn characters (as opposed to just claiming it and then failing to deliver). Readers like me (and there are a lot of us) are endlessly disappointed by all the Julia Quinn's and Mary Barcloughs of the world for the same reason that Heyer was (and would be) appalled by them: because if Heyer and Austen are your standard, then Julia Quinn and Mary Barclough et al are simply poorly researched and badly written in a way that makes them not much fun to read. I think that was the point of the article, a plea for better written regency romance novels (meaning engaging characters who have a worldview that is plausible for their time period, well written dialogue that isn't full of modern day americanisms, and getting the historic details at least approximately correct). As a member of the "love Austen and Heyer but can't stomach anyone else" crowd, I say here here.
Well, I love Mary Baloch. I have never really cared for Quinn. I was a bit disappointed she was the one who got picked for a TV show.
I do think there's a huge room out there for more historically correct books in this genre. That's why I like Rachel Knowles, who occasionally gets a few things wrong in her early books, but the more she goes on the better she gets. She's become a basically a full-time researcher in the field.
But, if you want to read a romance that has a certain dynamic in it, you want to read about the aristocracy of the time, it's ridiculous to sayy, Oh. don't put in a duke because other people did. The books are unconnected.
She makes a lot of good points in her article. I just didn't agree with that particular issue.
I don't agree with her on that issue either. Well, not completely. I agree that there is a lot of room to expand into other types of less overdone hero's (and thereby less overdone types of plots, see "Jamaica Inn" for a really great romance novel set in the regency era about smugglers, farm girls and horse thieves), but I don't think you need to abandon the aristocrats behaving badly storylines entirely (as long as you can use them to tell an interesting story, which I suspect mostly just comes down to good research and good writing). After all, Heyer is credited with founding the genre, and aristocrats behaving badly was her raison d'etre.
"Yesterday morning I was sitting in my dressing-room, when Sir William, who had not been at home all night, entered it: He looked as if he had not been in bed; his hair disordered; and, upon the whole, as forlorn a figure as you ever beheld, I was going to say; but you can form very little idea of these rakes of fashion after a night spent as they usually spend it"
Here, Julia is referring to her philandering husband as a rake. He may have two mistresses,. drink,.and gamble, but he is definitely not as bad as DeSade or even Byron.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire's real life husband was not a rake. He was just a standard spoilt 18th century aristocrat. Having a mistress was standard. There was no expectation that men would be faithful to their wives in that time period, and among women of the London ton (and the Paris equivalent) the expectation was that they would wait until they had born their husband a son before they started discretely cheating on him. Drinking and gambling were also standard for both sexes, and in Georgina's case, she was the one who ran up enormous gambling debts, not her husband. Her gambling debts were ruinous, and he held these debts over her head. It wasn't a happy marriage, and he was a total spoilt brat, but he wasn't a rake.
I think you should go look up rake in a regular dictionary. This idea you got from some academic source that rake only referred to thosw who qualify for the original Rakehwll Club is just not the way the word has ever been used.
Both in the modern world and in the Victorian period And by Georgiana herself, the word rake is used for a man who runs around with women and isn't faithful.
Not related to rakes but, one of the saddest things in The Sylph is that the
Sylph saves Julia from becoming addicted to gambling.
Yet we know that the author was not able to escape,
The book is painful ronrrad in general because we can see step by step what happened to Georgiana, and we know from history that there was no happy ending for her.
One thing one has to be very careful about when doing research is not taking one source out of proportion with others--so that one comes out with a wrong idea of what the time was like and then criticizes everybody who doesn't emphasize that one specific thing.
You seem to have read something where somebody thinks a rake was something other than the way the word is used, but you haven't researched far enough to realize that this "academic" use is not the way the word was used during the time period.
A modern academic idea is not any more accurate than the mistakes made by Regencyland writers. It's not according to the way the people were at the time.
Duke of Devonshire had a bunch of affairs in front of Georgiana and had his mistress and her children living in the house with them. That's pretty rakish.
She herself uses the word rake to describe him. Repeatedly
To say it is not correct or in keeping with the time period-- to criticize a woman from the time period, writing about the time period, for her use of language...
At that point one is not doing research, one is imposing a modern concept on the past
Perhaps you haven't noticed but contemporary novels are not always an accurate representation of their time. This applied even more to novels written in the time of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (ie pre Austen) when reality was not what authors were even aspiring to emulate. One of the criticisms that people who didn't like Jane Austen's work made about her novels during her lifetime was that her work was too realistic. They accused her of a lack of creativity, because her characters behaved just like real people, something that was unheard of at the time.
In terms of research, I have read dozens and dozens of books about rakes, what is and is not a rake, 18th century sexuality and the sexual mores of the time. I have autism. Not doing enough research is not one of my problems, and neither is failing to use language correctly. Accusing me of lack of research feels a lot like projection on your part.
I don't know why you are so invested in the idea that rakes included pretty ordinary 18th century men among their numbers, apart from stubbornness and an inability to admit that you are wrong, but it is a you problem, not a me one, and I don't feel that it is useful for us to continue to engage on the topic. I will say to you for the last time: we are going to need to agree to disagree about this one.
PS - BTW, Georgette Heyer agrees with me. She has said that none of her hero's were real life rakes, and that they were all very very very very very very watered down and defanged in comparison to the real thing. You may believe that you have done more research into the topic then her, and that you have a better understanding of the long 18th century then she does, and then I do, and then the countless academics who agree with her, and with dozens and dozens of people who have written books about 18th century sexuality, but I sincerely doubt that you are right.
I think this may be the cause of your misinterpretation. The way the Duke of Devonshire behaved was not considered to be dissolute, immoral, or lacking in restraint by the standards of his time. You are projecting your own modern day morals onto a different place and time. Anyway, I'm simply not going to continue engaging with you on this topic, because it's pointless. You've made up your mind and your not willing to admit that you've got this one wrong (or at least that everybody who knows anything about this topic from Pen and Sword authors, to serious historians, to Georgette Heyer, to academics disagrees with your interpretation). And now I'm going to mute this thread. Have a nice day.
Great post. I just saw the movie Alien for the first time, and it struck me just how important to the film it was that Ripley was a girl. Famously, the character was male in the original script and changed in production.
The change was correct, because it made Ripley the Final Girl in a horror movie, an extremely effective and time-honored trope. Originally the script-writer said he made Ripley male for no reason other than to subvert the trope. This is Rian Johnson style subversion; if you don't have a good reason for subverting a trope, you almost certainly shouldn't. Ripley being a woman was an objective improvement to the story and was even built upon in the sequel, Aliens.
I have no problem with a duke, but I would politely dispute the idea that hero is who is neither a hermit nor a rake makes for a less satisfying regency romance. Exhibit A: Jane Austen, generally regarded as the best writer of regency era romance in every possible way. Neither Mr Darcy (the most romantic man in fiction), nor Mr Knightly, or Captain Wentworth were either rakes or hermits, or even titled. Exhibit B: Georgette Heyer, the queen of regency romance has many wonderful, much beloved hero's who are not rakes, hermits or titled (along with all her rakes and lords). Cotillion and Arabella are two of her most beloved novels, both staring mild rather effeminate men, titleless and modelled vaguely after Beau Brummell. If they can do it, then it can be done, even if other people have not thus far managed.
I would also note that "rake" heros in regency romances which aren't written by Heyer are almost never actual rakes (and if you do some research into actual 18th century rakes you will realize why, because these were stomach churning men who would be almost impossible to turn into hero's). Even Heyer's rakes were all very toned down. Lord Vidal (from Devil's cub) was the only one who really qualified as a real life rake, and he was the most minor end of the rake spectrum (the wild young man with too much money and too much time on his hands variety, ala the Earl of Rochester and Lord Littleton, and his modern day equivalents, young men in a rock band). Even his dear old dad, the Duke of Avon, really really really wasn't a rake by actual 18th century standards. He was just a standard 18th century man of fashion with a nasty streak. Don't get me wrong, I adore the Duke of Avon, and I think he's a marvellous creation, but he's not actually a rake.
Also, even though I have no problem with a duke, the so-called-rake and aristocrats in general have been so overused, that I can appreciate the "if I read another one, I'll scream" sentiment. They have been done to death, and there are a lot of under explored corners of the regency and 18th century that are ripe for really romantic romance novels. Pirates (if you set your novel in the early 18th century), navy officers, army officers (have your heroine follow the drum - during the Napoleonic wars, what an amazing setting), smuggling/smugglers, a black former slave from a family of witch doctors turned highwayman. There are no shortage of manly and potentially romantic men who have been badly under utilized by regency romance writers.
Mr. Darcy is absolutely the Hermit.
The hermit, in this context, means a man who has never fallen love before. A man other girls can't get
Darcy is a perfect example of that.
As to Jane Austin, I would argue that she writes committed men is coming not romances. In the closer her characters come to a hermit type, like darcy, the better the romance quality.
What makes a good normal it would makes a good romance overlap but are not exactly the same.
I've read quite a few Heywr books recently,...and the heroes were for the most part rakes like Avon or hermits... Like you want me up to hear us
Hemit in this case does that mean that they are withdrawn from society, only from what we would call dating.
Have you heard of Georgette Heyer's famous golden zone re hero's? She once wrote somewhere that a hero ideally ought to sit somewhere between Bronte's Mr Rochester and Austen's Mr Darcy in terms of how nice/good/flawed he is. If he is less flawed then Mr Darcy (ala Mr Bingley, and also Freddie from Cotillion) or more flawed then Mr Rochester (ala Heathcliffe, Lord Vidal and the Duke of Avon) then they were not ideal hero material. One thing that is quite noticeable about Heyer's hero's is how they changed over time. Andover, Vidal and Avon were all written early in her career (before she turned 25), and they all got steadily less rakish over time.
She also said quite often, that she was sick to death of writing about aristocrats behaving badly and longed to write about people who were more middle class but her audience was so enamored of her pseudo rakes and aristocrats that she didn't dare.
Yes. I felt quite sorry for her.
There are many kinds of novels with love stories beyond the category romance, so to speak, but she did them so well that this was her readers asked for.
This may be why her stories got a bit simpler over time (compare, say, Regency Buck with Sprig Muslin)
I've actually been planning to write an article just on her books and some of the differences over time.
Even though the pseudo-rake and the aristocratic hero have been done to death and I am not very interested in reading about them unless the author can find something fresh to say (or does it very very well), if you do wander too far away from the rest of the flock in regards to who you make your hero and heroine and the story you chose to tell about them (tropes etc), you are likely to discover that you are no longer part of the genre that you think you are, and then you get into difficulty marketing your work unless you already have an established audience you can take with you.
Right. If the hero falls clearly into the range of aristocratic heroes, the story can be called a Regency romance.
If he goes beyond a certainly range, it's not. It's a love story set in the regency.
Why? Because it's not going to produce the emotions that a Regency romance reader is looking for.
Considering that it was pretty clear that Tracy had raped other women and was planning to rape the one who wasn't called Jenifer (her name in that book will come back to me in a moment. Diana?), I think it is pretty clear he was a real rake.
Bit the word was legitimately used, even at the time, for men who seduced women and didn't plan to marry....even if they didn't qualify for the Rakehell Club.
Like I said, read about the lives of the famous actual rakes. You will be horrified and you will change your mind. Also, Tracey Andover wasn't a Heyer hero, and you can't just give Avon his history, because in the end he was a different character with a different and considerably watered down history. Frankly, I suspect that the reason she did end up changing all the names was because Andover's history/behavior was too troubling for her to be able to sell him as a hero. Also, the standard for being a rake was higher then attending Sir Francis Dashwoods orgies, not lower. Some of your founding father's attended them, but they were not rakes. These were really really really bad men, men who would make you throw up in your mouth.
The thing is that just like the eligible duke is a fictional convention, the Regency romance rake is a fictional convention. If a man is a rake by the standards of modern day Regency romance readers, he's a rake in a Regency romance.
But Avon claims Tracy past His reference ate the things that happened, like him kidnapping Jennifer, show that he's supposed to be that character, and worse. She' invents additional bad background things for him that don't even show up if Tracy's book.
And, as I said, there were lots of men who are considered ranks who are not qualified to be members of the Rakehell Club . S
So it is not accurate to say a guy wasn't a rake just because he wasn't as bad as some of the other rates. :-)
PS - I wrote the first draft of my first novel with a Heyer style rake. (At least, that was my intention. At the end of the first draft he was very drippy and milk toast and not at all rake like and it was difficult to understand why my heroines parents objected to him so strongly). I then got around to doing my reading about actual rakes and discovered to my horror what real rakes were really like, something that made me feel physically ill. I ended up with a sinister Duke of Avon level pseudo rake, a man who my heroines parents were 100% justified in not wanting her to marry, but who was still nothing like the real thing. My learning was to do all my research before starting the novel.
What you're describing is a group of men that existed, many of them before the Regency period.
But, if you looked into it, you would find that the lesser level, the cads and boundaries, still often called rates, also existed.
Some of them appear in the books of the period
A man doesn't have to be as bad as a man can be to still be not the kind of guy a parent wants daughter to marry.
(For some reason, DeSade was quite popular when I was in college . It didn't occur to me until this conversation that maybe the general public was not familiar with him.)
I disagree. I think you haven't done enough research into how the average upper class man actually behaved in this era and how the real life rakes actually behaved. We have George Selwyn, the famous necrophile and child molester. We have Lord Byron who knocked up his sister and molested dozens of 12 year old boys. We have General Charteris, the rape master general, who raped so many working class women the he ended up sentenced to death despite being upper class, the Marquis de Sade (whose life and work is much much much worse then you imagine if you haven't attempted to read his work, which I do not recommend). You have the Earl of Rochester, a violent, drunk young man, who was a sex addict and cheated on his wife with every woman he met (but died in his late 20's, seemingly of syphilis, so may have grown out of it if he'd lived as many rock stars eventually grow out of it). You have the Earl of March/Duke of Queensberry, a (comparatively) harmless sex addict who started out as dangerously charming and ended up a gross creepy old man.
Believe me, among those who have researched rakes, my view that Vidal was the only Heyer hero who qualified is a standard conclusion. Heyer herself acknowledged freely that her rakes were extremely watered down versions of such.
Don't forget, you never get to see a rake in all of Austen's cannon. Willoughby, Wickham, Frank Churchill, Anne Elliott's cousin, Henry Crawford - these were men of poor character, but none of them were rakes.
Jimmy Saville, Jeffrey Epstein, and P Diddy are the modern equivalent of these men.
I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree about this one.
The word rake had a much wider use than you're using it for.
It might have had a specific use in the mid 1700s, but by the 1800s it was a much wider term.
Take for instance the adage of the time that a reform break made the best husband.
They weren't talking about the actual original Rakehells, such as you're talking about..
They were talking about the kind of guy who played around or fell in love with a bunch of women or carried on for a bit and then settled down.
And I hope you're absolutely disagree with you about Avon. Because he's supposed to bhave the same past as Tracy from The Black Moth, who absolutely is a rather awful rake.
Even if you give him Tracy Andover's history, he's pretty tame by the standards of actual 18th century rakes. Read about George Selwyn, Lord Byron, General Charteris (affectionately known as "the rape master general"), and the Marquis de Sade. These men are despicable hard core sex offenders. No one who appears in Heyer, even as a villain, comes anywhere close. There are other categories, the sex addict (the Earl of Sandwich, the Earl of March/Duke of Queensberry, the Earl of Rochester), and wild drunk young bad boy (once again the Earl of Rochester, Lord Littleton), but he doesn't fit those patterns either. I'm afraid that by the extremely low standards of upper class 18th century men, the Duke of Avon's just not bad enough.
The problem is that these statistics are in tension with the notion that this is really taking place in the historical era. It can interfere with suspension of disbelief.
It is far from the worst offender in that respect. Part of the general problem of historical fiction is that they tend to congregate about periods. So you get so many featuring Eleanor of Aquitaine, or Stephan, Maud, and Matilda in the Anarchy, or all the royals in the War of the Roses, and each book ascribes to each historical figure such a character as fits the book's plot, and they are not miscible. Consciously thinking them as separate fictions means you are thinking of them as fictions. (Mind you, my issue with the War of Roses was compounded by my reading books set there before I learned there were two times a King Richard was overthrown by a Henry.)
I don't know about that. If you read actual histories, you will also find multiple incompatible accounts of the people in them. A good friend of mine likes to point to Mary Renault's The Last of the Wine as showing how Socrates was seen by Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon to account for their thoroughly dissimilar portrayals of him. One might say the same about many other historical figures.
Yes, but in that case, insofar as the accounts conflict, at most one is right. Possibly all are wrong. (True, they may present different aspects that are brought about by different situations, but that's not the issue in the novels where the situations are too similar.)
Incompatible accounts would work fine if the character were off-stage, and other characters talked about him. With the character on-stage, displaying the actual character, and possibly even letting us into the character's very thoughts, there is a realism of presentation that means that we know one of the fictional versions is wrong, and it can grate. (Not for all readers. But for some of us.)
Yep. :-)
I read two historical fiction novels about the Crusader sack of Byzantium in 1204. Both prominently featured the Empress Euphrosyne. One made her a “termagant” while the other made her a nymphomaniac. It brought home the fact that neither of them really knew what she was like.
As to characters, I really am a Regency Romance fan. Dukes, earls, viscounta... these are the guys I enjoy reading about.
The others--pirates, escape slaves, Vikings, I used to read about, but now they are just not interesting to me in the way the Regency arr.
I might enjoy a book about them but it's not going to be my guilty pleasure escape reading.
Dukes don't get old for me. :-)
I don't find it a problem, as long as I don't stop to try to mentally compare it with the other books in my head at the time.
Even as a child I understood the idea this is this author's version of King so and so and this other book is this other author's version of King so and so.
So I never think about another Duke I've read about in a different Regency when I'm reading Regency....unless the other book was by the same author, which case I often like if there's a brief reference to her other characters. Makes her stuff seem more realistic.
I wonder how bad the ladies’ odds get if you ask how many men were ever simultaneously a) dukes b) handsome young bachelors.
Better if he can be “heir to a dukedom”…
But that’s just nitpicking for the fun of it, main point absolutely taken.
Mortality rates were exceedingly high in that day. Notice how Jane Austen causally kills off Mrs. Eliot in *Persuasion* so that Mr. Eliot is free to marry again, without any concern that this will rouse sympathy for him.
A young duke was far more plausible than nowadays.
True
I think that was the problem Maria Bertram encountered in Mansfield Park. Her fat stupid fiancé was worth 12,000 pounds a year, and men worth 12,000 pounds a year didn't grow on tree's, even if they were fat and stupid and didn't have a title.
Oh right I forgot to include “he also has to actually be rich, can’t be impoverished by gambling debts.” Odds getting worse and worse…
But I guess Darcy was technically a commoner so there’s that.
If she's rich, he can be poor, as long as he's lost his money because of his father, or he's reformed.
Right
For dukes?
Not very good! :-)
Great point!
I've heard people moan and groan so much about tropes but, like you said, never stop to think why these tropes exist in the first place. One author I know of in particular does this all the time - writes blog post after blog post tearing into tropes, how boring they are, talking about how they are tired and want something different.....then when they describe their next work, its still filled with the same tropes! Sadly? They think they are doing it differently, too! "I turned the trop 90 degrees or 180 degrees so it's not the trope anymore!" Except....yes, sorry, it is still the trope.....
Right.
I really think the best thing to do is to just think of it like a story and 'what would they do' and not take any concern about whether someone else is written it that way before.
IWhen I first wanted to be a writer, I used to really worry about that, was I being original?
The n, in French class in college, .we.translated Pascal's penses.
And one of them said, nothing's written until I write it.
I took that to heart. I decided that our point of view, or unique way of looking at something, is what differs from one writer from another. So twe should explore and enjoy that and not worry about getting a new plot or a new type of character or something that's nigh impossible.
Great article! I've been a Georgette Heyer fan since I was a teenager, and I have yet to find an author of her calibre in any of the regency romances I've read in the past 50 years.
If such an author exists, please let me know!
I still own a few paperbacks, and I continue to reread them every other decade or so. I never read the murder mysteries, though. Not my thing.
Andi Stockton Fox (on FB)
I find it really interesting that neither of us like mystery in a romance. I do like mysteries, but not in romance.
I wonder why?
Funny, I find that weird, too.
Even given our lack of conversation (lol except a couple years ago sending your stories to my sister😍) she loved them
Maybe I don’t want romance to screw up a great mystery.
Certainly, I’d rather an awesome mystery (for once!) was not based on sexual attraction.
And when mystery gets in the way of the real relationships of the romance, it often is disappointing.
;-)
I know we don't talk much, but I do enjoy seeing what you are up to occasionally on Facebook.
You and I have similar taste, I suspect!
I thought so when I first met you on FB.
:-)
I always thought it was a shame Obi Wan Kenobi’s love in the prequels had to end in tragedy. He’s not exactly showy, over-the-top masculine, but you can probably see why he’d be attractive, and getting through his vow of celibacy/non attachment had to be an achievement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMpSZKld1dY
It's weird that they said the power was genetic and then they encourage them not to reproduce.
Personally I think that was a mistake.
I’m 200 pages into StarQuest by the way. I read the first half in no time, but work hasn’t allowed me much time to finish the third.
Hope you enjoy it!
I'll finish as soon as I can!
I’m not a big fan of the prequel era and still hold that the only good parts came from EU writers who loved the franchise doing their best to make Lucas’ ideas from the movies work. I much prefer the early EU writers’ speculations about the Clone Wars and before. Children of the Jedi by Barbara Hambly was very intriguing
I just read the piece you reference ("how accurate does a historical romance have to be"), and I have to say, her sentiments reflect mine. The reason that the only novels that are viewed as part of the regency romance cannon that I read are Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen is because of the lack of historical accuracy, the failure to enter into the spirit of the time period, the bad writing, and the endless unimaginative identikit plots. Obviously, there are a lot of people who do like the fare which modern regency romance writers are putting out, because the genre sells really well, but there are also a lot of people like me out there who love Austen and Heyer and are hungry for more well researched, well written, romance novels set in the 18th and early 19th century, ones that really do have sparkling dialogue and well drawn characters (as opposed to just claiming it and then failing to deliver). Readers like me (and there are a lot of us) are endlessly disappointed by all the Julia Quinn's and Mary Barcloughs of the world for the same reason that Heyer was (and would be) appalled by them: because if Heyer and Austen are your standard, then Julia Quinn and Mary Barclough et al are simply poorly researched and badly written in a way that makes them not much fun to read. I think that was the point of the article, a plea for better written regency romance novels (meaning engaging characters who have a worldview that is plausible for their time period, well written dialogue that isn't full of modern day americanisms, and getting the historic details at least approximately correct). As a member of the "love Austen and Heyer but can't stomach anyone else" crowd, I say here here.
I love both.
Well, I love Mary Baloch. I have never really cared for Quinn. I was a bit disappointed she was the one who got picked for a TV show.
I do think there's a huge room out there for more historically correct books in this genre. That's why I like Rachel Knowles, who occasionally gets a few things wrong in her early books, but the more she goes on the better she gets. She's become a basically a full-time researcher in the field.
But, if you want to read a romance that has a certain dynamic in it, you want to read about the aristocracy of the time, it's ridiculous to sayy, Oh. don't put in a duke because other people did. The books are unconnected.
She makes a lot of good points in her article. I just didn't agree with that particular issue.
I don't agree with her on that issue either. Well, not completely. I agree that there is a lot of room to expand into other types of less overdone hero's (and thereby less overdone types of plots, see "Jamaica Inn" for a really great romance novel set in the regency era about smugglers, farm girls and horse thieves), but I don't think you need to abandon the aristocrats behaving badly storylines entirely (as long as you can use them to tell an interesting story, which I suspect mostly just comes down to good research and good writing). After all, Heyer is credited with founding the genre, and aristocrats behaving badly was her raison d'etre.
There's definitely great room for other types of stories, but that doesn't make this type of story not good.
There's something just kind of relaxing and charming about it.
You may enjoy Alida Leacroft's Georgina and Cecily
I second this.
From the Sylph:
"Yesterday morning I was sitting in my dressing-room, when Sir William, who had not been at home all night, entered it: He looked as if he had not been in bed; his hair disordered; and, upon the whole, as forlorn a figure as you ever beheld, I was going to say; but you can form very little idea of these rakes of fashion after a night spent as they usually spend it"
Here, Julia is referring to her philandering husband as a rake. He may have two mistresses,. drink,.and gamble, but he is definitely not as bad as DeSade or even Byron.
But i. 1778, she called him a rake.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire's real life husband was not a rake. He was just a standard spoilt 18th century aristocrat. Having a mistress was standard. There was no expectation that men would be faithful to their wives in that time period, and among women of the London ton (and the Paris equivalent) the expectation was that they would wait until they had born their husband a son before they started discretely cheating on him. Drinking and gambling were also standard for both sexes, and in Georgina's case, she was the one who ran up enormous gambling debts, not her husband. Her gambling debts were ruinous, and he held these debts over her head. It wasn't a happy marriage, and he was a total spoilt brat, but he wasn't a rake.
She disagrees with you.
I think you should go look up rake in a regular dictionary. This idea you got from some academic source that rake only referred to thosw who qualify for the original Rakehwll Club is just not the way the word has ever been used.
Both in the modern world and in the Victorian period And by Georgiana herself, the word rake is used for a man who runs around with women and isn't faithful.
Not related to rakes but, one of the saddest things in The Sylph is that the
Sylph saves Julia from becoming addicted to gambling.
Yet we know that the author was not able to escape,
The book is painful ronrrad in general because we can see step by step what happened to Georgiana, and we know from history that there was no happy ending for her.
One thing one has to be very careful about when doing research is not taking one source out of proportion with others--so that one comes out with a wrong idea of what the time was like and then criticizes everybody who doesn't emphasize that one specific thing.
You seem to have read something where somebody thinks a rake was something other than the way the word is used, but you haven't researched far enough to realize that this "academic" use is not the way the word was used during the time period.
A modern academic idea is not any more accurate than the mistakes made by Regencyland writers. It's not according to the way the people were at the time.
Duke of Devonshire had a bunch of affairs in front of Georgiana and had his mistress and her children living in the house with them. That's pretty rakish.
She herself uses the word rake to describe him. Repeatedly
To say it is not correct or in keeping with the time period-- to criticize a woman from the time period, writing about the time period, for her use of language...
At that point one is not doing research, one is imposing a modern concept on the past
Perhaps you haven't noticed but contemporary novels are not always an accurate representation of their time. This applied even more to novels written in the time of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (ie pre Austen) when reality was not what authors were even aspiring to emulate. One of the criticisms that people who didn't like Jane Austen's work made about her novels during her lifetime was that her work was too realistic. They accused her of a lack of creativity, because her characters behaved just like real people, something that was unheard of at the time.
In terms of research, I have read dozens and dozens of books about rakes, what is and is not a rake, 18th century sexuality and the sexual mores of the time. I have autism. Not doing enough research is not one of my problems, and neither is failing to use language correctly. Accusing me of lack of research feels a lot like projection on your part.
I don't know why you are so invested in the idea that rakes included pretty ordinary 18th century men among their numbers, apart from stubbornness and an inability to admit that you are wrong, but it is a you problem, not a me one, and I don't feel that it is useful for us to continue to engage on the topic. I will say to you for the last time: we are going to need to agree to disagree about this one.
PS - BTW, Georgette Heyer agrees with me. She has said that none of her hero's were real life rakes, and that they were all very very very very very very watered down and defanged in comparison to the real thing. You may believe that you have done more research into the topic then her, and that you have a better understanding of the long 18th century then she does, and then I do, and then the countless academics who agree with her, and with dozens and dozens of people who have written books about 18th century sexuality, but I sincerely doubt that you are right.
Here is the definition of Rake from dictionary.com:
a dissolute or immoral person, especially a man who indulges in vices or lacks sexual restraint.
This definition clearly fits both the Duke of Devonshire and his fictional version in The Sylph.
Georgiana uses the word six or seven times in the book. I'm sure she knew what it meant at the time.
I think this may be the cause of your misinterpretation. The way the Duke of Devonshire behaved was not considered to be dissolute, immoral, or lacking in restraint by the standards of his time. You are projecting your own modern day morals onto a different place and time. Anyway, I'm simply not going to continue engaging with you on this topic, because it's pointless. You've made up your mind and your not willing to admit that you've got this one wrong (or at least that everybody who knows anything about this topic from Pen and Sword authors, to serious historians, to Georgette Heyer, to academics disagrees with your interpretation). And now I'm going to mute this thread. Have a nice day.
Great post. I just saw the movie Alien for the first time, and it struck me just how important to the film it was that Ripley was a girl. Famously, the character was male in the original script and changed in production.
The change was correct, because it made Ripley the Final Girl in a horror movie, an extremely effective and time-honored trope. Originally the script-writer said he made Ripley male for no reason other than to subvert the trope. This is Rian Johnson style subversion; if you don't have a good reason for subverting a trope, you almost certainly shouldn't. Ripley being a woman was an objective improvement to the story and was even built upon in the sequel, Aliens.