With a candlestick in the conservatory

I'd been looking all over for someplace for my hero Ash and my heroine Lydia to have sex. They're in a betrothal of convenience so they can be alone together without a chaperone, but: it's wintertime, cold and wet outside; Ash is staying at an inn where she would be recognized; and Lydia's family home is huge but filled with windows and it's unpredictable when a servant might pop in or a gardener or visitor wander by outside.

Then, in an unrelated conversation, Ash (who grew up very poor) asked if Lydia's house had an orangery like he's heard about. And it hit me: the conservatory would be warm, and in the evening there wouldn't be anyone there. Could this be the place?

I did some research, online and at the library. I highly recommend the book Glass Houses: A History of Greenhouses, Orangeries, and Conservatories by May Woods and Arete Swartz Warren. I discovered a few things that surprised me (having known absolutely nothing about the topic previously).

The building I was thinking of would almost exclusively be called a "greenhouse" until the early nineteenth century (including some buildings, like the Orangery at Kensington Palace, that were referred to as orangeries in the Victorian period and still are). "Orangery" had not yet generalized from referring only to orange trees and usually meant an outside area where the orange trees were placed in summer, although it could also refer to a minimally heated building where they were moved in winter to keep them from freezing. A building that was for tropical plants generally would be a greenhouse, although it usually included orange, lemon, and lime trees in wintertime. Other popular plants included gardenias, jasmine, camellias (although those didn't reach the height of their popularity until the 1840s), agaves (then called American aloes), and myrtles.

Greenhouses were only kept at between 40 and 50 degrees Fahrenheit, as being the temperature appropriate for wintering citrus trees. In fact, the entire functionality of greenhouses was a little different than I had expected, which leads to...

Greenhouses were not built with glass roofs until the early nineteenth century. The change happened both because the technology necessary for cast-iron-and-glass construction was developed, and because a much greater variety of tropical plants were being brought to England, such as orchids, which then needed to be displayed. In the Regency era, older greenhouses might have their roofs replaced with glass ones, or might be rebuilt in the new way. But it was also perfectly possible that a greenhouse belonging to a family that wasn't especially interested in exotic plants would still be in the older style.

In the late eighteenth century, the commonest form of greenhouse was a long, narrow neoclassical stone building on the grounds, sometimes near the main house or attached to one of the wings, but often not. (They could also be made of wood if money and labor were an issue, but it was less desirable because less permanent and less heat-retaining.) It had a peaked roof and tall windows with heavy shutters on the south wall only (and occasionally one or two on the narrow western wall).

The orangery at Kew Gardens, built in 1761, shows the typical shape. Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

During the day, the shutters would be opened to let in the light, then closed again at night (incidentally providing plenty of privacy for Ash and Lydia!). In the summertime, the windows themselves would be thrown open during the day to let in air for the plants that were too delicate or too stationary (e.g. a vine growing over a wall) to be moved entirely outdoors.

Photo by xlibber, via Wikimedia Commons. Here you can see the orange trees in decorative tubs have been moved outdoors in summer.

The building was heated by stoves below the floor whose smoke was then piped through the northern stone wall with flues that were as close to horizontal as possible. Anything that needed a warmer temperature or any fruits and vegetables that were to be forced out of season were kept in practical and unornamental forcing houses (sometimes called stoves) out of sight, usually near the kitchen gardens. These forcing houses were much smaller and often did have glass roofs.

An exception to this rule is the Dunmore Pineapple, built for the Earl of Dunmore in 1761 in Stirlingshire, Scotland.

Photo via Wikimedia Commons. The pineapples would have been kept in the peak-roofed wings to either side; the central pineapple-shaped part was for recreational use. Originally, there were also glass houses for peaches, melons, cherries, and strawberries that stretched on either side of the stone building.

There were also vineries, which varied in shape but were built specifically for, you guessed it, vines, often grapes. The vinery at Hampton Court still has a Black Hamburg grape vine planted in 1768 by Capability Brown (okay, he probably didn't actually plant it himself, but)--the vinery itself, though, has been replaced many times.

"The Vinery," by Thomas Rowlandson, via Wikimedia Commons. Undated, can anyone hazard a guess based on the clothes?

For more photos of late Georgian greenhouses, including a great one of the unrestored interior of one, check out my Pinterest board for Crimson Joy reference images. You can see the oldest extant cast-iron-and-glass greenhouse in England, built at Chiselhampton at the turn of the century, here. I'm afraid it's not a great picture but you can see the general shape.

For a detailed and readable primary source on the varieties of available plants and their care, I highly recommend John Claudius Loudon's Encyclopedia of Gardening, 1824 (link goes to Google books).

Charting Malcolm's & Suzanne's pasts

One of the interesting questions Cara Elliott/Andrea Penrose asked when she interviewed me on Word Wenches about The Paris Affair concerned how I developed Malcolm's & Suzanne's pasts and how I developed them. In addition to the fascination of researching history, I love creating my characters' history. I knew from the start that Malcolm & Suzanne's allegiances would be divided, Malcolm a British diplomat and spy, Suzanne a French agent. Then I began to think about what kind of people would end up their situations. The divide between them seemed to be to strongest if Malcolm came from the heart of the British aristocracy – he doesn’t have a title himself, but his mother’s father is a duke, he’s connected by family or friendship to a good portion of the beau monde, he went to Harrow and Oxford.

Whereas with Suzanne, I had to figure out a background that would have made someone an agent in her teens. It made sense that she had been orphaned and left to fend for herself in the tumult of the Peninsular War. She also needed to have considerable acting ability, so I made her parents traveling actors. I think the fact that she had a nurturing childhood for her first fifteen years and then had her world violently wrenched apart says a lot about her. In some ways she has a very hard edge, but though she might deny it, she’s better than Malcolm at believing in happy endings. Whereas Malcolm grew up in luxury but with parents who were a lot more emotionally distant. The irony is that Malcolm’s and Suzanne’s political ideals are remarkably similar. They’re both reformers, Radical reformers for their day, with a keen belief in human rights. They just have different very different approaches to how to bring about social and political change.  

Authors, how do you go about creating backstories for your characters? Readers, what are some of your favorite examples of characters shaped by their personal histories?    

photo: Raphael Coffey       

The "Death" of the Historical

There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the demise of the historical novel.  In fact, I’ve been hearing about it on a weekly basis. 

Three weeks ago, friends back from the London Book Fair informed me that the scuttlebutt there was that the historical novel was dead.  Last week, AAR posted “Where have all the Historical Romances gone?”  And just this week, Dear Author opined that the historical romance should be put out of its misery.

What’s going on?

I have a bunch of theories, none of them terribly coherent.  (I’m in the midst of revisions just now, so my brain is a sub-species of mush.)  But here they are, such as they are:

The market tends to glut.  Remember the rise and fall of chick lit?  A particular sort of book tends to sell very well, spawns a sea of sequels, readers eventually get bored, and the trend dies.  On the historical fiction side, we’ve seen this with the Other Other Other Boleyn Girl’s fourteenth cousin twice removed; on the historical romance side, with Regency rakes who really don’t want to get married until they meet that feisty miss who happens to be running a matchmaking agency/bake shoppe/ early suffragette bureau on the side.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t an appetite for the historical. Certainly, the popularity of Downton Abbey should be enough to show that people still hunger after stories set in the past.  Just as chick lit changed and developed, moving into women’s fiction, contemporary romance, and YA, the historical is seeking out new frontiers as well.  There are plenty of historical offshoots out there: time slip novels (like Susanna Kearsley's much anticipated Firebird), fictionalized biography (The Aviator’s Wife, Z), and historical paranormal (think Deborah Harkness or Bee Ridgway).  Certain types of historical novels and historical romances may rise and wane in popularity, but that doesn't mean the historical as a whole is dead.

I also wonder if we’re missing the forest for the trends.  In our internet age, we create odd echo chambers for ourselves; trends come and go at the speed of lightning and small shifts get blown out of all proportion.  Are the books we’re buzzing about on the internet really the books people are taking out of the library, or reading and re-reading?  For those of us wrapped up in the industry, it’s easy to only pay attention to the trajectory of new books (and often only in their first few weeks of publication), which might provide a misleading picture of what people are actually reading on the ground.

Which leads me to my next point.  The number of available books has multiplied.  It’s not just new fiction coming out in greater quantity than ever before.  Suddenly, we have access to authors’ backlists in a way that would have been unimaginable ten years ago.  I know people who have gone from The Other Boleyn Girl to discovering Jean Plaidy, Anya Seton, Kathleen Winsor, M.M. Kaye, and other classic writers of historical fiction for the first time, while, on the historical romance side, I’ve heard a great deal about a return to the classic historical romances of the 80s and 90s, both in e-book form and, in many cases, in mass market print re-issue with snazzy new covers and blurbs from more recent popular authors.  These books aren’t new, they don’t get buzz, and they aren’t hitting lists, but that doesn’t make them any less meaningful to readers or lessen their appeal.  What we’re seeing may not be so much a dissolution as a diffusion.

There’s no denying that paranormal, contemporary and erotica are enjoying an ascendance right now—but I wouldn’t write off the historical yet.

What do you think?

Regency Paper Doll (coloring contest!)

Several years ago I created a Regency paper doll for my very first RWA conference. I thought it was a fun way to introduce myself to the Beau Monde Chapter. So I drew her and all her clothes and had it printed up in a limited edtion of 100 copies that were put in all the conference bags.

It recently occured to me that I could give her a second life on my website as a freebie. And then a couple of readers suggested it would be fun to hold coloring contests. So I'm going to be doing montly giveaways based around her clothes (and adding new outfits as we go along). This is the first one, and we're coloring her habit.

Download Harriet's habit and color it in however you chose (the full PDF of the doll and all her clothes is on the page as well). You'll find plenty of inspiration over on my Georgian Habit Pinterest Board.

Email me a scan or a snap shot of your final design (isobelcarr.author (at) gmail.com) with HARRIET'S HABIT in the subject line by May 31st.

All entries will be shared on Pinterest (and probably on FaceBook and Twitter) and a winner will be randomly selected.

Prize: A full signed set of the League of Second Sons (US only), OR a full set of the series in eBook form (where I can legally gift this), OR a $25 gift certificate to the online bookstore of your choice (Amazon, Amazon.uk, Kobo, etc., so long as the site will let me buy it and gift it).

Void where prohibited. Odds of winning dependent upon number of entries.

Have Fun!

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in

I'm working on the second book in my Lively St. Lemeston series, Crimson Joy, and I just did something that I've done before, that I'll probably do again, and that I always feel conflicted about:

I'm stealing a story. I'm taking something that happened to a real person, and giving it to my heroine. In this case, it's this anecdote, cited in a footnote of Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England, concerning “treating,” or the practice of patrons providing free food and drink for electors prior to a poll.

I had a vague recollection of this anecdote...he ran out of ale, so he opened up his expensive French brandy? I couldn't remember where I'd seen it, but I thought I might have posted it on my blog. After backreading for half an hour, I almost gave up. I don't need the real anecdote, I thought. It's fiction. Maybe I can improve on it, make it even better than the real thing.

Then I found the real thing. There is no improving on this. This is perfection. Unless it's apocryphal and someone's already improved on it! Who knows? Either way, I covet the glory of this anecdote for myself, and I will take it.

At the 1768 Northampton contest, the Earl of Halifax exhausted his store of mature port and turned in desperation to his choicest claret, whereupon the “rabble” deserted his side and joined the forces of the Earl of Northampton, “turning up their noses and vying ‘never to vote in the interest of a man who gave them sour port to drink.’”

In Crimson Joy, this happened to my heroine's grandfather. 

But I feel guilty. I feel like I'm cheating the Earl of Halifax somehow, or something. 

There's a similar piece of theft, of stealing directly from real life because nothing could possibly be more dramatic than the plain truth, in Sweet Disorder. 

In Life in Wellington's Army, Antony Brett-Jones devotes a bloodcurdling chapter to "The Wounded and Sick." One sentence wouldn't let me go: "From the windows of one convent amputated arms and legs were flung down into a square among wounded soldiers who lay waiting their turn to go before the surgeons, if they lived long enough."

I moved that to the aftermath of Badajoz and took it for my ex-officer hero (who didn't undergo an amputation but does have a limp and some chronic pain). Because I couldn't resist.

Who, exactly, am I stealing from? What are the possible negative consequences, to anyone, of moving a real event slightly in space and time? I don't really know. Sometimes I do genuinely, firmly oppose tweaking history for a story: when it covers up or simplifies injustice, and/or when it might be hurtful to people alive today. I made three tumblr posts on the subject just last week, one about Nazis and Captain America, and two about lobotomies. 

None of that really applies in these cases. But I can't avoid a lingering sense of unease, as if I'm picking history's pocket.

What do you think?

Spies, Loyalty, Betrayal, & the Napoleonic Wars

Recently, I did a very fun interview on Word Wenches with the wonderful Cara Elliott/Andrea Penrose about the release of The Paris Affair. Cara asked some wonderful questions, in particular about the themes of loyalty and betrayal that run through my books and why I chose the Napoleonic Wars as a setting for those stories. As often happens, those interview questions caused me to mull over things in my books. I've been thinking about it a lot in and around promoting The Paris Affair, finishing my WIP, and getting ready for the Merola Opera Program's annual Benefit (where I am with Mélanie above).

I first gravitated to the Regency/Napoleonic era through my love of Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. But I also love spy stories, both James Bond adventure and the sort of intricate chess games and moral dilemmas John le Carré dramatizes so brilliantly. The Napoleonic Wars offers are a wonderfully rich setting for both types of story. So many different sides, so many different factions within sides. The French under Napoleon had been bent on conquest, but they had also brought much-needed reforms to many countries. Some liberal Spaniards saw supporting the French in the Peninsular War as the quickest route to progressive reform. And after the Napoleonic Wars, a number of the victors wanted to turn the clock back to before the French Revolution  and saw any hint of reform as one step away from blood in the streets. Friends easily melt into enemies and back again. Napoleon’s longtime foreign minister Prince Talleyrand  later became prime minister under the Bourbon restoration. Joseph Fouché who had been ruthless in using terror against enemies of the Bonapartist government, was equally ruthless in going after Napoleon’s supporters who were proscribed from the amnesty after Waterloo. In the midst of breakneck adventure, a love affair can have political consequences, a tactical decision can shatter a friendship, it can come down to a question not of whether or not commit betrayal but only of who or what to betray.

I’ve always been fascinated by moral dilemmas. And I’m intrigued by how romantic fidelity and betrayal can parallel other types of fidelity and betrayal (whether between husbands and wives or in their relationship with other characters or with a country or cause). I like writing stories of intrigue set in tumultuous times, but I think in those sorts of times (probably always but then more than ever) choices don’t tend to come down to easy, clear-questions of right and wrong. It’s interesting to see how characters wrestle with those issues and how the personal and the political intertwine. The possibility that a loved one or friend isn’t who you thought they were is perhaps one of our deepest fears in a relationship. And yet most of us are somewhat different people in different aspects of our lives and have different loyalties – to spouses, children, lovers, friends, causes, countries, work. Sometimes it isn’t so much a question of betrayal as of deciding which loyalty comes first. It’s not so far from the seemingly lofty sentiment of “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Lov’d I not Honour more” to betraying a lover for a cause.

Or so my heroine Suzanne might argue. Her husband Malcolm might have more difficulty with the idea. He takes personal loyalties very seriously, though he was the one who went off to the field at Waterloo and risked himself (though he wasn't a soldier) leaving his wife and son behind in Brussels. In the midst of the carnage, he wondered which loyalty he should have put first. While Suzanne, for different reasons, was wondering much the same thing. It's a question that continues to haunt both of them in The Paris Affair and to fascinate me as a writer.

Writers, do you choose time periods because they lend themselves particularly well to the type of stories you want to tell? Or does your choice of time period influence the stories you create? Readers, do you think you like to read about particular eras because of the type of stories and the issues in those stories that tend to work in those eras? What's the worst choice of loyalties you've encountered in a book? And what's your favorite spy story in any era?

photo: Drew Altizer

A Grim Almanac of Georgian London (Research Books)

My sister (who knows me so well) got me A Grim Almanac of Georgian London for my birthday. It’s an amazing little book, filled with snippets of horror (pigs eating discarded babies), scandal (the Duchess of Kingston’s bigamy trial [she got away with it!!!]), duels, and murders too numerous to recount.

One of the things I found very interesting was the number of killings that were found to be manslaughter rather than murder, for which the penalty was a burning on the hand (and nothing more). So, steal a handkerchief and go to the gallows (also, having sexual relations with an animal was a punishable by death!), stab a love rival in a fit of jealousy, get a burn on your hand and go about your business.

Today’s entry reads as follows:

15 April 1795 Daniel Mendoza was a world-champion boxer, whose style was scientific and included many defensive manoeuveres. This incorporated side-stepping, moving around,, ducking, blocking and avoiding punches. At the time, this was revolutionary; as a result of this new style, although he was only 5ft 7in and 160lb, Mendoza was able to overcome much larger opponents. He is the only middleweight ever to win the heavyweight championship of the world. However, on this day, Mendoza lost his title to John Jackson, who employed a tactic that would be considered ungentlemanly at least: he grabbed Mendoza’s long hair, held him, and beat him unconscious in the ninth round. Jackson’s own head was shaved, so other boxers could not play this dirty trick on him.

It’s a great book if you have an interest in the grittier aspects of life in London during the Georgian era. I already have several grim plot bunnies jumping about ...