Writing and Repression: Jane Austen and the Bodice-Ripper

"What happened, I think, is that someone said they wanted it to be sexy. What they meant was the kind of sexuality that's in the book, the sexuality of repression.When you read the book, you know that everybody's horny -- all that flirtation and dancing and conversation, but nobody's going to get laid."

"I thought to myself: 'This is where he wants to go across the room and punch someone. This is where he wants to kiss her. This is where he wants sex with her right now.' I'd imagine a man doing it all, and then not doing any of it. That's all I did."

Lacy's vintage smut was is hard act to follow. And so, in a tight situation, who best to help me out but that sublimely sexy writer Jane Austen?

More precisely Jane Austen as channeled by screenwriter Andrew Davies as channeled by Colin Firth, as he spoke in various interviews more than a decade ago, trying to explain how he worked up the mojo to play Mr. Darcy in the 1995-6 TV adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, soon to be showed once again in the current PBS Jane Austen fest.

Repression. What a concept.

And it works, too. Extraordinarily well. Skimming over the text of Pride and Prejudice, it's not the least bit of a stretch to to plug in Mr. Darcy wanting to kiss, have sex, etc.

Like at this moment:

...the pianoforte was opened; and Darcy, after a few moments' recollection, was not sorry for it. He began to feel the danger of paying Elizabeth too much attention.

Or this:

But no sooner had he made it clear to himself and his friends that she hardly had a good feature in her face, than he began to find it was rendered uncommonly intelligent by the beautiful expression of her dark eyes. To this discovery succeeded some others equally mortifying.

Oh yes. Mortifying will do very well indeed. In romance, we love a mortified hero, not to speak of one who "begins to feel the danger..." And we especially love it when the author has first introduced him in all his smug, hunky, thoughtless toughness and now shows his inner writhings and torments.

I've read that it was during the era of the bodice-ripper that this outer-to-inner revelation becomes popular romance convention. You know, stuff like (I'm improvising here), "He'd sailed the seven seas, plundered the Spanish Main. No one could master him at arms and yet... she... she.. this meek little chit of a tradesman's daughter. Why did she set him all aquiver... afire?"

Needless to say, it works better as filtered through Austen's her gorgeous little understated ironies. But it shows you why there are those who insist (especially when they feel they have to stick up for the genre) that Jane Austen was a romance writer.

I suppose you can say that she was, in this way, at least in her spare time when she wasn't inventing the modern novel. She didn't invent the moment when the hero reveals his hot inner anxieties and arousals (I think it might have been Richardson who did that, in Clarissa) but she did it so deftly and demurely that she can take your breath away.

And provide stage directions for guys in waistcoats and tight pants for the next couple of centuries as well.

Note: I took the Firth quotes from this article. And while you're at it, you won't regret reading this wonderfully witty piece on Austen by Martin Amis.

So, are you doing the TV Austen fest?

Do you agree that Austen might have been an influence on the bodice-ripper authors? Or do you think I ought to be pilloried for suggesting such a thing?

The Making of an Erotic Romance Reader

Tomorrow my other half will be over at the Risky Regencies blogging about Mansfield Park in the week-long (with a prize!) build up to Jane Austen's birthday on December 16. The Riskies each picked their favorite Austen book to discuss, and I knew Mansfield Park would be a problem, so I volunteered to talk about it. Just to give you a preview, I found it an extraordinarily sexy book; there's a lot of physical awareness among the characters and a huge amount of activity taking place around rooms and spaces and entrances. I kept coming across passages that just didn't sound like Jane Austen (color coded for your convenience):

...stopping at the entrance door...to take a last look at the five or six determined couples, who were still hard at work--and then, creeping slowly up the principal staircase, pursued by the ceaseless country-dance, feverish with hopes and fears, soup and negus, sore-footed and fatigued, restless and agitated, yet feeling, in spite of everything, that a ball was indeed delightful.

And I wondered why the book, that once struck me as being tedious, longwinded, and with the nerdiest of heroes and heroines, now bristles with sexuality. (Oh, okay. Fanny and Edmund are still pretty nerdy.) The simple answer is that I read differently and I've changed, and possibly I'm smarter now about Jane Austen. I'd hope so, considering how long it's been.

On the other hand there are also books I've always found sexy--Jane Eyre, for instance (see my post Jane on Jane). I'm indifferent to Mr. Rochester--for me the big turn-on in the book has always been Lowood. All that discipline. All that spanking, dressed in frilly white underwear and black stockings, under the lascivious gaze of Brocklehurst and the Board of Trustees (I made that up. Didn't I?).

What books have you found that you've interpreted differently at different stages of your life? Or what books do you feel you have a particular insight into because you're a reader/writer of erotic romance?

Come and Come and Come Again

"They're all rubbish really, aren't they? Read one and you've read them all...."

...Cheryl prattled on. "I mean, they're not really romances....They're just debased versions of the sentimental novel of courtship and marriage that started with Richardson's Pamela. A realistic setting, an ordinary heroine that the reader can identify with, a simple plot about finding a husband....Titillating but moral."

It's with some ambivalence that I confide to you that Cheryl's derisory take on what is referred to a "Bills and Moon type of romance" comes straight out of one of my all-time favorite comic novels. Small World, by David Lodge, is a wildly literate, wonderfully funny and humane book that I recommend with no ambivalence and no reservations (well, one caveat: don't read it if you're too p.c. re our genre to get past the Bills and Moon putdown -- which I will address, don't worry).

I almost called it "one of my favorite comic (non-romance) novels." But then I realized how weird it would be to do that, because the subtitle of Small World is "An Academic Romance." Its plot comprises perhaps half a dozen love stories. And most of them are "academic romances," because most of the characters (though not Cheryl whom I quoted) are academics who talk pretty much non-stop about literature and often about what Cheryl (and Lodge) call "real romance" -- of, you know, the Arthurian/Faerie Queen variety. The characters fall in and out of love and bed; losing and finding, chasing and following each other all over the world, on their way to and from a series of academic literature conferences.

Cheryl, who works in an airport, has only recently traded Bills and Moon in for The Faerie Queen and Orlando Furioso. But for most of the novel she functions as a "helper figure." (Lit crit is big on helper figures: all fairy tales have 'em, and I'd hazard that so do romances of all varieties; the ones I write certainly do). Anyway, not only does Cheryl help Small World's feckless lovers chase each another around the globe, but she helps us, its feckless readers, to make our way through the world of Lodge's novel -- by speaking his view of the early Western European romance tradition that Small World joins, comments upon, and generally has fun with:

"Real romance is a pre-novelistic kind of narrative. It's full of adventure and coincidence and surprises and marvels, and has lots of characters who are lost or enchanted or wandering about looking for each other, or for the Grail, or something like that. Of course, they're often in love too..."

And of course she's in love as well -- unrequitedly, until... but that would be a spoiler.

And though I hope you do read Small World, the real yes-I-do-have-one point of this post goes back to that original putdown of Bills and Moon romance (or what we on this blog would normally just call romance).

Because it's all very well to call Richardson's Pamela a "sentimental novel of courtship and marriage," as long as one remembers that it's usually also called the first novel. And although origins are always debatable, what's not debatable is that one of the great things that novels do is "valorize the ordinary" in "a realistic setting," -- as in Jane Austen's famous advice that "Three of four families in a country village are the very thing to work on." I'd argue that if romance as we know it is in that tradition, I don't think anyone need sneer about where it's coming from.

But I'd also argue that romance as we know it has a great deal to do with the other tradition, of the Arthurian legends and the grail and everything else. Because I'd argue that very few true-life love stories don't come equipped with their own adventures, coincidences, surprises, and marvels -- even if you didn't, as I did, fall in love with your spouse-to-be during the acid-saturated, tie-dyed sixties. I'd argue that there's something so dizzying and challenging about finding one's life partner and coming up against the secrets of one's own nature at the same time that marvels like twins (Eloisa James, anyone?) or spells (amnesia, anyone?) make a certain sense in telling this kind of story.

I'd argue for both sides. As Austen did in Sense and Sensibility.

And I'd argue that the romance as we know it draws upon both the quotidian and the marvelous, the reasonable need for companionship and comfort and the big crazy hungers for wild sexy excess. And that romance ought to do both. More. Bigger. Yes.

Hell, I've just only begun to argue, because my argument hasn't gotten around to sex, which it ought to, given what blog we're on. So here's another quote from Small World, this time from a character named Angelica (because, as you can see, women do a lot of the intellectual heavy lifting in this book). Anyhow, Angelica says, by way of an academic conference presentation:

Romance... has not one climax but many; the pleasure of this text comes and comes and comes again. No sooner is one crisis in the fortunes of the hero averted than a new one present itself; no sooner has one mystery been solved than another is raised; no sooner has one adventure been concluded than another begins. The narrative questions open and close, open and close, like the contractions of the vaginal muscles in intercourse, and this process is in principle endless.... Romance is a multiple orgasm.

And by the way, if you're a romance writer and you're coming to the RWA National Conference in Dallas next month, do check out the workshop Jane Lockwood and I will be giving, called "Writing the Hot Historical." I'm not promising multiple orgasms, but I think it'll be pretty good. It's scheduled for Friday morning at 9:45.

Any questions?

If there was one question...

If there was one question you wanted to ask about the sexual climate during the Regency period, what would it be?

I'm doing a talk at the Beau Monde conference in July (the Beau Monde is the Regency specialty chapter of Romance Writers of America (RWA) in case you were wondering) called Sex in the Regency (subtitled: What Jane Austen Knew and Lord Byron Didn't). So this is why I ask.

I have a goodly portion of the talk done, and a mental date with the University Social Sciences library in a week (because I've read some verra interesting tidbits on Caro Lamb which puts a whole different slant on her, sorta) for some last minute research notes.

Last minute because the handouts are due in two weeks.

I have a bit of Rowlandson, some familiar stuff on what Jane Austen knew, availability of erotic works, and Byron. I even have the last sentence. But something is missing, and I cannot figure out what it might be....

And so I turn to you, dear readers, and my fellow crumpets to see what it is I'm missing.

If there was one question you wanted to ask about the sexual climate during the Regency period, what would it be?



(Sorry for the lateness -- but a girl is allowed to sleep in on a holiday, isn't she? (This is a complete lie -- I was up at seven, off to breakfast, shopped and planted two marguerites, got two loads of washing on before I remembered to come here)

Sex and Power - a few speculations

My thoughts keep returning to Celia's bracing post of a few days ago - the zesty codswallop-and-guff language of it (you go, girl) but more particularly the wonderful roll call of Jane Austen's bad girls. Taken together, it's an impressive argument.

And it's an argument that adds up to strong evidence that Regency young ladies were a whole lot more knowing about earthy and bodily matters than a generation or two of trad regency novels have led us to believe - even though (as in the case of Austen herself) the young ladies might never have acted upon that knowledge.

And then there was Lacy's post about the Rowlandson prints, and also Kalen Hughes's post at History Hoydens - about V.A.C. Gatrell’s City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-century England and the case it makes for the ubiquity of those dirty pix as part of everyday Georgian and Regency life.

All of which makes it more difficult to accept what had been the standard (and beloved) image of the sheltered Regency miss - and prompting some Regency romance writers (at least on one loop I'm on) to cast about for historically valid ways to continue to write books in that chaste mode.

And leading me to wonder just what makes that image of the sheltered Regency miss - that mode, that mythology, if you will - so beloved in the first place.

And to speculate that the element that has been missing from the conversation thus far is power.

Because what makes the Regency so compelling as an imaginary landscape, I think, is that the more covert the erotics, the more naked the power relationships and the social inequities. In Austen at any rate, every character seems to wear his or her net worth and social consequence as though on a placard around his or her neck. Mr. Darcy's ten thousand a year; Emma Woodhouse's thirty thousand pounds... it's all clear on the nose on your face - and pointing to a map of power and a set of rules as elaborately explicated as you'd find in vampire horror fiction.

And also as available as a source of guilty pleasure, especially for someone like me, who got my novelistic chops from writing S/M erotica.

Comic S/M, I always hasten to add - but do I need to add it? The Marquis de Sade was often wildly funny, and in her essay "The Pornographic Imagination" Susan Sontag wrote about the deadpan Buster Keaton quality of some of her favorite hot literary texts.

I may never completely understand why inequities of power should constitute an erotic reading pleasure when they cause so much pain in the real world - when on the front pages they're a source of real-world shame and consternation, and to my mind quite rightly so. I'll probably spend the rest of my writing days trying to work this out.

But I do know that part of the answer to this question lies in the power of comedy and wit to deflate the excesses of power (at least on the printed page). Which brings us back to the traditional Regency, as Jane Aiken Hodge describes it in The Private World of Georgette Heyer:

We are all snobs of some kind, and it is comfortable to find oneself in a world where the rules are so clearly established, where privilege and duty go hand in hand, and a terrible mockery awaits anyone who takes advantage of position. This is a world, like that of Shakespeare’s comedies, where laughter is the touchstone and the purifier; where exposure to the mockery of one’s equals is punishment enough...

In the traditional (ie non-sexually explicit) Regency, the heroine's most formidable weapon is often her wit - or her wits. And I agree with the advocates of the traditional Regency that this quality is to be cherished. Absurdly powerful rakish duke meets absurdly clever girl; I'm on board for that.

But hey, that's where I came on board at the first place, and why I got into comic S/M.

And that's where the arc becomes a circle for me - sex and power talking to each other through the medium of humor. The power of wit and of erotic attraction as correctives to political despotism and overreaching - and also as their funhouse mirror reflections and the reader's fantasy ways of getting all the good stuff.

And that's the world I think that some of us crumpet strumpets and our friends have often espied lurking among the genteel teacups.

Which only begins to open this line of inquiry for me. But I'd love to know what you think. Have a crumpet.

Bad Girls

This month I got an email from a fan who basically asked me: Did people in the Regency period really behave that way? (That is, have mad rampant sex out of wedlock.)

"Hell, yes" was the short answer.

The longer answer goes something like this.... if Jane Austen could allude to it in her books, then not only did it happen, but it must have been known to unmarried women in order for them to write about it.

Yes, the venerable Jane Austen knew about sex out of wedlock -- and the associated consequences -- which, not to spoil, I address in SHOW ME. I can think of a number examples of her work right off the top of my head:

Lydia Bennett in Pride and Prejudice: runs off with Wickham and is found living in sin. Wickham is bribed to marry her, and Lydia is as happy as larry. As the saying goes. Completely oblivious that she'd just run her family's name through the mud.

Maria Bertram in Mansfield Park: gets married and then has a torrid affair and is packed off to somewhere in the country. Although I don't remember if there was an annulment or a divorce because of it. Maria behaved very badly.

Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park: a very badly behaved character. You practically get to witness her attempted seduction of the virtuous Edmund. A very bad sort -- and yet moving around in polite society. Which I think means, she's suspected of being a very bad sort -- but has yet to be caught out at it.

Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility: a foolish girl who causes scandal with the "Wickham" of the book and should have been banished from society, but of course does the right thing and becomes terribly ill and then Alan Rickman marries her. (Lucky girl.)

And I am not entirely unconvinced that Lucy Steele from Sense and Sensibility was the innocent she makes herself out to be. Why on earth else would you propose to someone if you didn't want to sleep with them? And, as I understand it, it was not uncommon for the bed to be shared prior to the wedding night -- although I think this may have been restricted to the lower classes.

OK, so Jane Austen is rampant with "bad girls" left and right. "Bad girls" in that they aren't the virtuous innocents we have been used to reading about in most modern day Regency romances. And now's our chance to write about them.

And from history, we have the ultimate bad girl -- Caroline Lamb, mad bad and dangerous to know. (OK, so she said it about Byron, but really, it applies to herself.) She ran about dressed in men's clothing, caused all sorts of scenes before Byron, not to mention being his lover, and yes, I think she was married when all this happened, but she certainly didn't behave like she was. Poor thing ended up "mad" and locked away at a family estate, I believe. Quite the Victorian moral ending to a wild life, non?

So, please, don't give me this guff about how unmarried women in the Regency were innocents. That's a load of romantic codswallop. If they haven't experienced it for themselves, they've certainly heard about it. Because there were plenty of bad girls out there then. We didn't invent this illicit sex stuff you know.

Hi there!
I am Lacy Danes. I’m not really sure how to intro myself here, so I guess I will just jump in with how I stated reading historical romance.

I have always loved books with really hot sex in them. I would go on Amazon and search for books that were historical romance that had a sensuality rating of 8 or 9 and I would buy any and all I could.

I started reading Lisa Kleypas that way. I loved her and then moved from her to Susan Enoch. My mom turned me on to Stephanie Laurens from there; I started reading Mary Balogh, Jo Beverly, Sabrina Jefferies and finally the classics like Jane Austin. I too have never read Heyer. In the classics, I really missed the steam… the sex…. so I ventured to classic erotica.

A few of my favorites are Fanny Hill, The Pearl, My Secret Life, The Romance Of Lust and most stories by the Marquis De Sade. What I love about them is the way there are social rules, yet none, or there are rules and they break them. I don’t know if you would agree with that statement about the above stories, but for me sexually doing what some feel is indecent, is incredibly hot and when these books were written the content was VERY naughty. Hell it still is viewed as naughty.

I just recently picked up a small book that made me laugh and laugh. It is called the Autobiography Of A Louse. I have not finished it yet, the language is purple prose-ish and that is what made me laugh but so far it has been quite entertaining.

For me the stories in the above books gave me a glimpse into the minds of the men of the times. They show what they thought about sex or at least what they fantasized about!

Most of the classic erotica I enjoy is from the Victorian times. I love history and especially history of social sexual behaviors.

So here I am… my book WHAT SHE CRAVES releases in March of 2007. WSC is my first book and I'm still in awe that I am published. My stories always seem to involve some sort of kink. Whether that is a light form of S&M or strong women who wish to submit and please a man.

I look forward to meeting and chatting with you all!

Hugs and Kisses,
Lacy.

Once upon a time...

I'd love to say that this picture is of me in a past life but it is, in fact, Caroline Murat and her children. I've always liked it because she has that look on her face I often have, (when surrounded by all four children), of 'take me away!'

Once upon a time I desperately wanted to be Jane Austen. Then it was Georgette Heyer. Finally I became Kate Pearce and I quite like her. She’s everything that attracted me to the two great ladies mentioned above and a lot lot more smutty.

Like dear Jane Lockwood, I’m an import to the USA from the Old Country where I grew up in the middle of a family of six sisters. Three of them got married in a fairly short period of time, echoing the Bennett sisters, leaving me with my own bedroom for the first time in my life.

I’ve always been fascinated by sex in all its amazing variety and detail. My historical romances kept getting turned down for being too unconventional, so I decided the best thing to do was be even more unconventional. Hence my first erotic Regency romance, “Eden’s Pleasure” was written six weeks after the birth of my 4th child. (I’m sure there’s some deep hidden meaning behind that inauspicious start but whatever). I sold it to Ellora’s Cave in Nov 2005 and I haven’t looked back.

The sequel to “Eden’s Pleasure” “Antonia’s Bargain” came out in January 07 from Ellora’s Cave but readers will have to wait a while for another Regency erotic romance as I just sold two (well, my agent did) to Kensington Aphrodisia (waving at Celia). I think they’ll be out in 2008. (lowers voice) In the meantime, I write in other erotic sub-genres as well, so please go and check out my website!

Some of the things I’m looking forward to discussing are historical attitudes toward contraception and the more ambiguous kind of happy ever after. I’m sure we’ll get around to those fascinating subjects soon! When I'm super famous, I'm also planning on 'improving' all the Georgette Heyer's with a bit of smut. Only problem is, I can't decide which book to start with...Damarel or the Duke of Avon? hmm...