Blog

My trip to the UK!

It’s been almost a month since I got back from the UK, and it’s taken me this long to organize and upload all my pictures. But my trip was AMAZING. We started out in Newcastle, where we spent most of our time on our friend’s couch giggling and watching TV–“Black Books” is my new favorite thing!–but also managed to take in a castle and gardens, some art museums, and lovely architecture. One of my favorite things about the UK is how old stuff lives right alongside new stuff: in Newcastle I saw Tudor wattle-and-daub buildings jostling Georgian Neoclassical stone, Victorian townhouses, and modern glass-and-steel.

Then we took a train, bus, and ferry up to Orkney. I was horribly seasick on the ferry, which I didn’t expect because I’ve never had a problem with boats before. You know those scenes when characters are crossing the Channel and someone’s seasick and they’re lying there shaking and moaning, “I’m dying, I know it”? I always thought those were an exaggeration but no, it is exactly like that.

Orkney is, hands down, the most beautiful place I’ve ever been, and its history is fascinating too. I was lucky enough to be staying with a friend who works for Historic Scotland so she had all kinds of great information and recommended a couple books as well. I’ll be setting a book there sooner rather than later, I think. I was also pathetically amazed by the sight of cows and sheep grazing right at the edge of the sea. As an American, I’m just not used to the lack of beaches!

Then we drove down to Edinburgh and spent a few days there before flying home. My friend took us on the scenic route through the Highlands, and wow. I get what the big deal is now. (There were sheep on the highway, too, in case you were wondering.)

We also discovered that the most popular brand of oatmeal in Scotland has this picture on the box. I think it’s the shotput that makes it.

I’ve uploaded all my best pictures to flickr. You can see them here. To whet your appetite, here are some of my favorites (I apologize for the sides being cut off, I can’t figure out how to make it not do that):

The Poison Gardens at Alnwick. Our guide was a truly macabre elderly woman in a sweater set, who kept making pronouncements like, “Two berries from this plant will kill a small child in ten hours. If you grind the berries into powder and sprinkle them on the ground, you will become invisible.”

I told you Orkney was beautiful:

These are naturally occuring steps in the rocks by the sea. What a great place for a kissing scene!

This chapel was built out by Italian POWs during World War II so that they would have a place to hold Catholic services. They used two Nissen huts, some plaster, and leftover concrete from the causeways they were building. Here’s the Wikipedia article–it’s a fascinating story and the chapel is beautiful.

And now for something completely different! This stuff was everywhere in Edinburgh.

IM000492.JPG

An embarrassment of riches

Last week I was very, very good and finished all my writing goals for the week! I even cleaned my bathroom (and boy, did it need it). So I promised myself I could buy as much as I wanted at the Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale this weekend. Here’s what I ended up with:

Research:

1. The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain 1789-1837, by Ben Wilson.
2. Slave Women in Caribbean Society 1650-1838, by Barbara Bush. (A different Barbara Bush.)
3. Napoleon’s Egypt: Invading the Middle East, by Juan Cole.
4. Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots, and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871 by Adam Zamoyski. I’m not sure how much of this will be Regency, nor does he appear to talk much about women. However, I’ve been wanting to read more about the Romantic movement for a long time and the book looks interesting, so we’ll see.
5. London Life in the Eighteenth Century by M. Dorothy George. She seems to mean the long eighteenth century (which can start as early as the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and end as late as the Great Reform Bill of 1832, although in this case it means 1700-1815), which is nice for me. It mostly focuses on the details of working class life, with a whole section on “London Immigrants and Emigrants,” one of my current research topics!
6. The Illustrated Companion to Nelson’s Navy, by Nicholas Blake and Richard Lawrence.

Romance:

1. Flat-Out Sexy by Erin McCarthy. I remember this got a great review on Smart Bitches when it first came out.
2. Seduction of a Proper Gentleman, by Victoria Alexander.
3. The Boys Next Door, by Jennifer Echols. (YA. I loved her debut about the marching band, Major Crush.)
4. All-American Girl by Meg Cabot. Possibly her last YA series I haven’t read any of.
5. Love Letters from a Duke by Elizabeth Boyle.
6. The Admiral’s Bride by Suzanne Brockmann. Someone recced this to me YEARS ago.
7. Aaaaand, an extra copy of Lord of Scoundrels. Because you never know.

Cookbooks:

I don’t cook at home as much as I used to now that I cook for a living, but I still love it and I always look in the cookbooks section. In past years I’ve found such gems as Barbara Cartland’s The Romance of Food, The First Ladies Cook Book (featuring the favorite recipe of each First Lady of the US), and last year a book of excitingly-shaped cakes (dinosaurs, volcanos, &c.). This year I ended up with:

1. Romantic Italian Cookery by Mary Cadogan.
2. The Joy of Liberace: Retro Recipes from America’s Kitschiest Kitchen. I never even knew Liberace was a cook! The book is full of amazing photos of him cooking, and also food with rhinestones on it.

Not a bad haul! If you’re looking for me in the next month or so, I’ll probably be diving into my books like Scrooge McDuck into his Money Bin.

Does your town have a library book sale? What’s the best find you ever bought there?

The House of Commons opera hat

I’ve been doing some research on the British Parliament for my next book, and wow. I forget how much OLDER the UK is sometimes, and how much more time they’ve had to accumulate customs.

On one page of my book (The Great Palace by Christopher Jones) I see:

“The Mace, the symbol of Royal authority, must always be present when the House is sitting. Without it, the House is totally powerless.”

(More on the Mace from Wikipedia. And here’s a picture.)

On the next page:

“The Serjeant-at-Arms[…]is the only person in the Chamber allowed to wear a sword.”

Two pages later:

The House of Commons snuffbox. It is kept by the Principal Doorkeeper. Any Member may ask for a pinch of snuff before going into the Chamber.”

How awesome is that? According to Wikipedia, “A floral-scented snuff called ‘English Rose’ is provided for members of the British House of Commons at public expense due to smoking in the House being banned since 1693. A famous silver communal snuff box kept at the entrance of the House was destroyed in an air raid during World War II with a replacement being subsequently presented to the House by Winston Churchill.” (The new box was made from the timber recovered from the damaged Chamber.) Nicholas Fairbairn, an MP until 1995, was known during his tenure for being the only person to actually use the snuff.

What is even more awesome is that I cannot possibly feel the least bit superior, because it turns out the US Senate has ceremonial snuffboxes too!

But my very, very favorite is this:

The House of Commons opera hat. The collapsible top hat which Members must wear if they want to raise a point of order during a division [their word for a vote].”

And there’s a little picture of an old top hat sitting on a bench.

I was desperately sad to discover that this custom had been discontinued following a recommendation of the Select Committee on the Modernization of the House of Commons:

“64. At present, if a Member seeks to raise a point of order during a division, he or she must speak ‘seated and covered’. In practice this means that an opera hat which is kept at each end of the Chamber has to be produced and passed to the Member concerned. This inevitably takes some time, during which the Member frequently seeks to use some other form of covering such as an Order Paper. This particular practice has almost certainly brought the House into greater ridicule than almost any other, particularly since the advent of television. We do not believe that it can be allowed to continue.”

Another beautiful image was provided by Hansard’s record of the discussion on the issue:

“We recommend a new procedure for raising points of order during a Division. At present, we have the opera hat, and, although some Members may feel that they look particularly fetching in it, it makes the House of Commons look ridiculous when someone wearing the hat is trying to raise a point of order from a seated position while everyone else is milling around and going to vote.”

(Sidenote: If anyone writing historical romance with a political dimension doesn’t already know about the online Hansard’s, here it is! It is saving my life with things like dates of parliamentary recesses, when bills were proposed, &c.)

Can anyone find a picture of the opera hat? Preferably being worn. My Google-fu is failing me.

ETA: Dave was kind enough to write and share this video of the opera hat in use! Thanks Dave!!

EEEE!

Very exciting news! My editor e-mailed me my cover yesterday!! Look:

Also note the incredibly flattering cover quote by Lauren Willig. I am the luckiest girl in the world.

I am so, so happy with this cover. I have heard a lot of horror stories about covers so I was a bit nervous about what mine would look like, but clearly the Dorchester art department is ACE. While in one small respect the cover doesn’t fit the book (the book takes place in the middle of summer), I think it captures the mood of the book perfectly. I LOVE the way the warm sunset colors contrast with the snow. Plus red and gold has been my favorite color combination since I was about ten years old.

The cover also fits the book in another way that I think must be a coincidence (although I don’t know for certain) but that means a lot to me personally. There’s a scene early in the book where my impoverished hero is having dinner with Penelope and her nouveau riche parents, trying to win them over so they’ll give their consent to the marriage.

It was as though he had the Midas touch. He went straight to her mother’s wall of sentimental engravings and old book illustrations in gilt frames, and pointed to a garishly-colored old engraving of Venice that her mother loved. “It’s the Bridge of Sighs! Have you been to Venice, Miss Brown?”

“No,” Penelope said. “I have never been out of England.”

Mrs. Brown smiled. “Oh, those old pictures are all mine. Penny is much too elegant for such trifles! I hope very much to go to Venice with Mr. Brown someday.”

Penelope, poor girl, is very concerned with appearing to have “elegant taste” at all times, since her parents sent her to boarding school with a lot of gently-bred girls and they all made fun of her for being a vulgar parvenue. I’m not entirely sure what type of wall-hangings she would prefer, but I’m guessing distantly-spaced original works in sober colors and plain frames, maybe contemporary landscapes or portraits. Gilt would NOT be involved. (Don’t worry, she mostly gets over herself by the end of the book!)

I, on the other hand, think Mrs. Brown’s wall sounds pretty, and it’s an exaggerated version of something from my own life. On the wall by my parents’ bed, there was a few feet between the window and the dresser where my mom had hung six or seven small romantic prints–a Hudson River School painting of the Amazon, a Bouguereau mother and child she got as a gift when I was born, a commemorative print my grandmother bought at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, a sheet music cover my father bought her as a gift, and so on.

My mom died a few months after I wrote that scene (and long before I finished the book), but she was the audience I imagined while I was writing anyway. She read Pride and Prejudice aloud to me when I was nine, introduced me to Regency romances when I was twelve, and read my first manuscript when I was seventeen and told me it was good (in retrospect, it might have been more accurate to say it had potential).

The framed picture on the cover of In for a Penny would have fit right in on her wall, and that makes me very happy.

And I'll be in Scotland afore ye!

Great news–plans are finalized and at the end of this month a friend and I are going to the UK for two weeks!

We’ll be visiting friends in Newcastle and Orkney, and then spending a few days in Edinburgh.

I’ve been to the UK twice before. My mom took me to London, Bath, and Brighton as a college graduation present (so five years ago–yes, I’m young), and the year before that I studied abroad in Paris and spent some time in the summer travelling around Europe. In England, I visited the same three cities plus Canterbury and Oxford.

It was wonderful and I loved all those cities (especially Bath–sorry, Jane Austen, I know you weren’t a fan!), but I’m excited to see a bit further north. Less and less of my book ideas seem to want to be set in London these days, so I want to collect other interesting settings. Newcastle is one of the northern industrial cities that come up so often when researching Regency politics and labor/class relations, and Orkney is…

Okay, my main association with Orkney is still Lot and Morgause from the Arthurian legends. But it’s at the very northernmost part of Scotland, and my friend and I are taking a six-hour ferry ride there from Aberdeen. I LOVE ferries. It is going to be beautiful! (And there is a BAR on the ferry. I’ve never been on a ferry with a bar before.) Also, my friend lives in a cottage. She doesn’t even have a street address, just “— Cottage.”

I promise I will post loads of pictures!

Does anyone have any tips to share for international travel (I haven’t been out of the country in years), or suggestions for things we really ought to see? Regency-era stuff especially welcome…

“Maybe they didn’t have black people back then.”

It’s International Blog Against Racism Week, and it FINALLY motivated me to do something I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time: research people of color in my era and setting of choice, Regency England.

I’ve written three manuscripts and I’m starting a fourth, and guess what? I haven’t written a single black character, or Indian character, or Egyptian character, or even a Jewish character (and I’m Jewish myself). I haven’t written a single character who isn’t white and Christian. Not even a minor character or an extra in a crowd scene, unless you count having my heroine bank with Rothschild that one time.

Why is that? Well, the most obvious, easy answer is that the minority populations of England weren’t as large during the early nineteenth century as they are today. Many of the big waves of immigration from different areas of the Empire hadn’t happened yet. And that’s true. But I think there are three factors that are far more important than that one:

1) My default is white. I wish this wasn’t true, but it is. If I have to describe a random housemaid or the heroine’s friend from finishing school or a sailor on the docks or a doctor or a land agent or a waitress or any of the huge cast of supporting characters that are inevitably created for any novel, it doesn’t occur to me unless I consciously think about it that THEY COULD BE A PERSON OF COLOR.

Even Victorian Thackeray did better than that in his historical novels–just off the top of my head, there was an African page boy in History of Henry Esmond and a mixed-race student at Miss Pinkerton’s in Vanity Fair. (Of course, both of those portrayals were racist, but that’s hardly an excuse for my own whitewashing.) English society in 1815 was a lot more homogenous than it is now, but it was also a lot less homogenous than I’ve depicted it in my books.

Why do I say “supporting characters” up there? Because there’s no way I know enough about nineteenth-century non-white-British cultures to write a story from the point of view of someone from one of those cultures. No way at all. Which leads me to:

2) I don’t write characters of color because I don’t have the knowledge base to write historical characters of color well, to give them the detail and the verisimilitude and the voice and life that every character needs.

Research for writing historical novels is an on-going process; no matter how many books I’ve read or how much I think I know about the Regency, every time I sit down to write I realize there’s another gaping hole in my information. When is a cavalry officer allowed to wear his uniform off-duty? I asked myself a few days ago, and I had no idea. I know quite a lot about historical accounting and poaching and new farming methods in Norfolk thanks to In for a Penny, and right now I’m busy researching bluestockings and the internal workings of the Whig party for my next book, but when the time comes to write the next book I’ll have to do a whole new set of research.

Since ALL of my information about the time period is acquired from books and fellow research geeks, and I don’t have general knowledge based in life experience the way I do about the modern world, I know nothing about Regency communities of color because…

I’ve never researched Regency communities of color. Because I never really thought about it, and I can get away with never thinking about it.

3) Writing characters of color is scary, because if you do it wrong people might get upset. If you just don’t write them, it is hard for people to get upset at you, because you blend in with all the other books that give the impression that the entire world is white.

I’m not happy writing books set in the All-White World anymore. So:

Here are some awesome Regency-set books written by white people that include major characters of color, as inspiration and example:

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, by Susanna Clarke. The character in question is the wonderful Stephen Black, an extremely competent butler who, to his great dismay, becomes the favorite friend of a cruel and capricious fairy ruler. Stephen is awesomely realized, and oh yeah, he saves England in the end.

Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series includes a variety of characters from different parts of the world (in particular, China and Africa).

The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Volume I: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson. This one is actually set in the US in the period leading up to the Revolutionary War, but it’s so great I included it anyway. It’s about a little boy who gradually realizes that he is a slave and that his entire upbringing is an experiment by Enlightenment philosophers and scientists to determine whether Africans are inferior to Europeans. It’s brilliant and inventive and the historical voice is amazing.

Here are the research books I just ordered:

Black London: Life Before Emancipation, by Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina. “Alongside migrants from all over Europe, Georgian London supported a community of more than 10,000 blacks. Theirs is the story that Ms. Gerzina, who teaches at Vassar College, tells with great clarity.” – New York Times Book Review

Immigration, ethnicity, and racism in Britain: 1815-1945, by Panikos Panayi.

And here are the ones I put on my wishlist:

Black Experience and the Empire.
Black Writers in Britain: 1760-1890.
Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830. Yes, I’m a geek, I can’t help it! Too bad textbooks like this are so expensive.
Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History.

If anyone can recommend good Regency romances with characters of color and/or good research reading on the subject, please do!

And here are some blog posts that brought home to me the importance of creating a multicultural world in my stories. They’re about science fiction and fantasy because I read a lot of geeky blogs, but I think the principle is the same.

This one is about Uhura in the new Star Trek movie. I’ve always found it really, really difficult to describe or articulate how this invisibility feels, how it affects you and the way that you view and experience media. I remember someone posted a one page article or somesuch wherein all of the actors in STXI had just one little soundbyte type quotation about their character and their feelings about the original version. John Cho’s was him noting that his reaction to Sulu was essentially: “OMG AN ASIAN GUY IS ON TV.”

This one is a moving essay about the Earthsea trilogy and how it felt to the author to finally read a fantasy story with characters of color in it. Seriously, read this. I cried. But I remember Dad saying, how come you never see anybody like that in the stories you like? And I remember answering, maybe they didn’t have black people back then. He said there’s always been black people. I said but black people can’t be wizards and space people and they can’t fight evil, so they can’t be in the story.

Musings on Race in Fantasy or: Why Ron Weasley isn’t Black. This poster rambles a bit, but he makes some points that resonated with me, as a white author. No writer would dream of suggesting that a black person couldn’t be beautiful, but our “generic” idea of beauty is pale and blonde, just like our “generic” idea of boyish charm is a freckly redhead and our “generic” idea of a wise man is a white guy with a long beard and a pointed nose.

I want to change, and I’m going to try. I know I’ll probably make a lot of mistakes, but I think that’s better than staying where I am, and hopefully, when I do mess up, I’ll be able to apologize, think about it, and do better next time.

Plus ça change…

I’ve been doing research for my next book, and stumbled across something that reminded me of an important point about writing historical fiction.

A few years ago I came across the following quote by William Hazlitt (from a series of lectures he gave in 1818): “I am a great admirer of the female writers of the present day; they appear to me like so many modern Muses.”

What a patronizing jerk! I thought. Those women aren’t there to inspire YOU, they’re artists who do their own creating!

Then, while reading the essay “Representing Culture: ‘The Nine Living Muses'” by Elizabeth Eger in Women, Writing, and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, which discusses this 1779 painting by Richard Samuel, I came across this passage:

“As Marina Warner has argued in her study of the allegory of female form, [the muses’] symbolic power is so universal that it seems that we are not meant to associate them with real women, let alone women artists. She is correct to make this point in a contemporary sense–we have for the large part lost a sense of the individual characters and functions of the muses, let alone the possibility that they might refer to real women. The muses form an allegory of ideas, in which the personification of abstract aesthetic categories is the primary device[…]Samuel, however, has painted his peers–living women who practiced the arts they represent[…]

Images of the muses or muse in the twentieth century have tended to be voiceless sources of male creativity rather than vivid practitioners of the arts. […C]ertain male poets, such as Robert Graves, have been responsible for perpetrating the myth of the muse as an eternally feminine and passive figure of inspiration. The Romantic and modernist concentration on the individual act of literary creation has tended to focus on the poet’s communication with the muse as an intimate and often highly sexualised relationship, obscuring the classical tradition of representing the muses as a group of independent, active, wilful and manipulative practitioners of the arts.”

There are things I know are different about the Regency gentry: they talked differently and dressed differently, duels were a reasonable way to resolve an argument, a woman who had sex before marriage was “ruined,” and not paying a gambling debt was worse than stiffing your grocer. I know those things because they’re big things and I can’t get away with not knowing them. (Although I still remember how shocked I was the first time I realized that “democracy” was a dirty word in mainstream society during the Regency! If I’d thought about it, I would have figured it out–but because positive associations with democracy are such a basic thing to me, I didn’t think about it.)

But it’s not just the big things that shift over time. Little things were different too, even things that seem “instinctive” or “obvious” to me. The muses represent X to me, so they must have represented X to a Regency person, because that is just what the muses are! But no, the human mind is a wonderful and fascinating thing, and many ways of thinking about things that seem self-evident are really just a product of culture.

Culture changes, even the little things. And if I want to write historical romance that really pulls the reader into another time and another world, if I want to really do justice to my time period, then I need to be as aware of that as possible.

(Of course, in searching for the quote for this post, I discovered that William Hazlitt goes on to say, “I could be in love with Mrs. Inchbald, romantic with Mrs. Radcliffe, and sarcastic with Madame D’Arblay”…so, I guess the women writers are just there to inspire him. He then mocks a series of women poets with such zingers as:

“Miss Baillie[‘s] tragedies and comedies, one of each to illustrate each of the passions, separately from the rest, are heresies in the dramatic art. She is a Unitarian in poetry. With her the passions are, like the French republic, one and indivisible: they are not so in nature, or in Shakespeare.”

Oh, snap! I’m now picturing his lecture as a stand-up comedy routine that bombed horribly. Probably that’s another anachronism, but hey, the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? Clearly I should have trusted my instincts about Hazlitt.)

The letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly

I was looking through my notebooks and came across a great quote about writing from Nikos Kazantzakis’s novel about St. Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis. (I can’t vouch for the translation in the linked edition–I read a much earlier one–but as far as I can tell it’s the only one in print.) The book is narrated by Francis’s best friend and follower, Brother Leo, who says (and I apologize in advance for the association of blackness with the devil):

“Yes, may God forgive me, but the letters of the alphabet frighten me terribly. They are sly, shameless demons–and dangerous! You open the inkwell, release them; they run off and how will you ever get control of them again? They come to life, join, separate, ignore your commands, arrange themselves as they like on the paper–black, with tails and horns. You scream at them and ignore them in vain: they do as they please. Prancing, pairing up shamelessly before you, they deceitfully expose what you did not wish to reveal, and they refuse to give voice to what is struggling, deep within your bowels, to come forth and speak to mankind.”

He’s got it right on the nose, doesn’t he?

Here is another bit from the book that I love:

“When an almond tree because covered with blossoms in the heart of winter, all the trees around it began to jeer. ‘What vanity,’ they screamed, ‘what insolence! Just think, it believes it can bring spring in this way!’ The flowers of the almond tree blushed for shame. ‘Forgive me, my sisters,’ said the tree. ‘I swear I did not want to blossom, but suddenly I felt a warm springtime breeze in my heart.'”

“Is it true, the dreadful story about you and Currer Bell?”

I recently talked about Thackeray’s dislike of Regency clothing. One of my favorite historical anecdotes about unfortunate coincidences and social awkwardness is about him and Charlotte Brontë.

I’m not actually sure how many times I’ve read Jane Eyre. The scene where Mr. Rochester talks about how there’s a thread from his chest to hers, and if they were separated he might take to bleeding internally—I swoon every time. A few years ago, I got a copy that reprinted the preface to the second edition. I laughed and laughed. Here’s the relevant bit in its entirety, because you don’t really get the scale of the fullsome earnestness otherwise:

“There is a man in our own days whose words are not framed to tickle delicate ears: who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel; and who speaks truth as deep, with a power as prophet-like and as vital—a mien as dauntless and daring. Is the satirist of Vanity Fair admired in high places? I cannot tell; but I think if some of those amongst whom he hurls the Greek fire of his sarcasm, and over whom he flashes the levin-brand of his denunciation, were to take his warnings in time—they or their seed might yet escape a fatal Ramoth-Gilead.

Why have I alluded to this man? I have alluded to him, Reader, because I think I see in him an intellect profounder and more unique than his contemporaries have yet recognised; because I regard him as the first social regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who would restore to rectitude the warped system of things; because I think no commentator on his writings has yet found the comparison that suits him, the terms which rightly characterize his talent. They say he is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humor, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vulture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does. His wit is bright, his humor attractive, but both bear the same relation to his serious genius, that the mere lambent sheet-lightning playing under the edge of the summer-cloud, does to the electric death-spark hid in his womb. Finally, I have alluded to Mr. Thackeray, because to him—if he will accept the tribute of a total stranger—I have dedicated this second edition of Jane Eyre.

Currer Bell.
Dec. 21st, 1847.”

Now, Thackeray is a very Victorian, moral writer, and he does have social/political/moral points to make with his books. But he’s also a snarky guy who doesn’t seem to take himself too seriously. And Charlotte Brontë is a genius, and Thackeray loved Jane Eyre, but…her sense of humor isn’t really her strong point, is it? I can’t imagine Thackeray reading this incredibly sincere, dramatic, serious dedication without laughing yet also being sort of vicariously embarrassed. I don’t think his intention was ever to save anyone from a fatal Ramoth-Gilead*, you know?

So I laughed, and I thought no more about it. But THEN I was reading a biography of Thackeray that my dad had lying around the house and discovered there was more to the story!**

Thackeray’s wife, like the first Mrs. Rochester, was mentally ill. Which Charlotte Brontë would have had no way of knowing. But there was ALREADY a rumor going around that “Currer Bell” was Thackeray’s children’s governess, getting back at him for his unflattering portrayal of her as Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair (which came out in serial form the same year). So when this dedication was printed a lot of people saw it as proof.

Yes! They were convinced that Jane was a Mary Sue for Charlotte Brontë and that Jane Eyre was about her and Thackeray’s forbidden love!

This rumor was so popular it was still going around THIRTEEN YEARS LATER. In 1860 Thackeray was at a dinner party, and an American lady asked, “Is it true, the dreadful story about you and Currer Bell?”

Thackeray said, “Alas, madam, it is all too true. And the fruits of that unhallowed intimacy were six children. I slew them all with my own hand.”

I love Thackeray a lot.

Now I’m wondering if Georgette Heyer was inspired by this misunderstanding when she wrote Sylvester, or the Wicked Uncle.

*I looked up Ramoth-Gilead, in case any of you were wondering. Apparently the reference is to 1 Kings 22: all the prophets except Micaiah tell King Ahab he’ll win if he fights to take back Ramoth-Gilead from the Syrians. Micaiah says, “I saw all Israel scattered upon the hills, as sheep that have not a shepherd: and the LORD said, These have no master: let them return every man to his house in peace.” Ahab gets really mad and throws Micaiah in prison and goes into battle anyway. Of course he loses and gets killed.

…It doesn’t say whether they let Micaiah out of prison after that.

**For this post, I confirmed the details in Love’s Madness by Helen Small.