cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

I can justify this post to myself as advance promotion for my Elgin Marbles romance, The Edge of Impropriety , due out in mass paperback next spring -- or as a warning that you might want to bu y it now, with its gorgeous trade cover while they last... But really, it's pure delicious escapism that's plummeted me into the midst of Steven Saylor 's fabulous Roma Sub Rosa mystery series, set during the final years of the Roman Republic and teaching me oodles about a history I find increasingly fascinating. And, I should add, featuring a detective hero I'm entirely smitten with. Gordianus the Finder is not only smart and sensual, he's deeply good and deeply inquisitive about his world. Besides his intelligence, Gordianus's major asset seems to be what he learned during his youthful wanderings outside of Rome, particularly in Alexandria, where Greek culture and Asian mystical traditions have taught him something about the provincialism of his own world (and where he...

One of the joys of participating in this blog is that I so often find inspiration in the posts of my fellow hoydens. "Yes," I'll find myself thinking as I read this or that post in the weeks preceding my turn. "Yes, that's true and interesting. But for my purposes, I'd like to look at it this way..." So, for example, qua Leslie's post about the Duchess of Windsor, her fabulous shoes and horrendous politics, some time I'd like to think more about the roots of today's romance (and mystery) genres in the Tory-ish habits of minds of writers like Georgette Heyer and Dorothy Sayers, even P.G. Wodehouse, during the period between the wars -- the comforts (take that as you like) of class inequality in a period of political instability. For readers and writers of historical romance today, how much of the Regency England we've come to feel so much at home in actually got its polish and perfection during (and in the image of the high life of) 193...

I think it's Shelley 's 1822 death in a boating accident (not quite 30 years old! Why, oh why , didn't he let Lord Byron teach him to swim?) that lies at the root of my interest in Regency figures at the seaside. In any case, I began The Edge of Impropriety with a boating accident , and ended it with a happier trip by water. But what did they wear during that period when sailing? No point patterning anyone after Shelley: this radical, atheistical, vegetarian son of a baronet (who borrowed every penny he could against his expectations, with the aim of depleting the family holdings by the end of his life) wore threadbare shirts wherever he went and rarely bothered with neckware. The prototypical romantic poet would have been sadly out of place among the gentlemen of Regency romance -- and anyway, he seems to have mostly gone sailing with his guy friends and left Mary , Claire , Mrs. Leigh Hunt, and the rest of the ladies home with the babies. In the prologue to Edge I m...

I approached my fellow Hoydens and asked about correct behavior on the blog for the release of a book. Should I jump up and down and make squealing sounds; should I mention the release in a discreet footnote after an erudite post, on, say, the early nineteenth century Gloucestershire eel industry; and above all, what sort of gloves should I wear on release day? The eels have to wait. Yes, my book is out today and although it doesn't have US distribution, you can buy it with free shipping worldwide from bookdepository.co.uk . You can also win a signed copy with a comment or question here. I'll pick a winner after the weekend and make an announcement. So, the book is, sort of, a sequel to The Rules of Gentility (HarperCollins, 2007; Little Black Dress, UK, 2008). I'd thought originally that if I did write a sequel I'd probably write about Philomena's twin sisters (remember a few years ago everyone had twins in their books?). But after Philomena's breathless twitt...

Once more, my perennial apologia: Although I love the material specifics of history, I don't have much of a gift for it. Too many primary sources and I'm gobsmacked by the messiness, ditzed and dizzied by real life's overabundance of detail. And though old documents are thrilling, there's all that handwriting to get through. So I get most of my history from novelists, who have to employ some principles of selection. From good novelists -- when I can, from the great ones, the women of the nineteenth century, who so fully and so movingly comprehended a world of property -- landed and intellectual both -- in which they weren't full citizens. Like Jane Austen's "acquisitive, high bourgeois society... interlocking with an agrarian capitalism... mediated by inherited titles and the making of family names." The literary historian Raymond Williams, in The Country and the City , continues that Austen's "eye for a house, for timber, for the details of ...