Hands-on innocence and experience

For me, the most fascinating thing about the Regency-Georgian period is the huge amount of contrasts. Here's a fascinating one--along with the vast amount of pornography on sale Dr. Bowdler was busy at work cleaning up Shakespeare and concerned parents were strapping their lads into harnesses at night to prevent any involuntary--or god forbid, voluntary--sexual activity. The Victorians perfected the guilt and shame and all the rest of it that their parents and grandparents got things off to a flying start.

This lovely contraption was in use in the first decade of the nineteeth century in France. France, no less, home of the ooh-la-la and all the rest of it.

One of the biggest bestsellers in England of the eighteenth century was a tract published anonymously but enjoying multiple best-selling reprints:

ONANIA:
or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences in both Sexes
Considered
With Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those Who Have
Already injured themselves by this Abominable Practice
To which are added
Divers remarkable letters from such Offenders, to the Author,
Lamenting their Impotencies and Diseases thereby...

Thrilling stuff, and as you read more of the title page, you begin to realize that the book became its own one-handed reading material (something readers were aware of at the time and which surely added to its popularity). This book, that surely must have caused as much agony and guilt as wicked pleasure, predated the Victorians by over a century. Read more here.

And the contrast with this rampant, hysterical prudery? Obviously, all the porn and naughtiness. But also something far more profound, I think--the Romantic movement itself, with its emphasis on solitude and allowing emotions and imagination to run free, the contemplation of the mysteries of nature and love.

Thoughts, anyone?

Sneak Peek Time

I finally got Advance Review Copies of Unmasqued and it's only right that I share the wealth...so here goes.

As most of you know, Unmasqued is my very erotic version of the Phantom of the Opera, as inspired by the Webber musical/movie version (not to mention Gerard Butler as Erik, the Phantom). I was always very disappointed that Christine left Erik and went off with Raoul, and so I decided to write the story as to why she did so....and with all the hot and heavy details about what went on behind the scenes that Webber (and Leroux) didn't show us.

Make a relevant comment on this post--ie, answer one or both of the questions below--and you're entered in the drawing. I'll pick a winner on Thursday morning, so you have almost two whole days!

Question: What is your favorite song from the Andrew Lloyd Webber Phantom of the Opera musical?

or

Question: How did you think the Phantom of the Opera should have ended?

Bad(der) Girls and Forbidden Books

The proposal I’m working on at the moment has for a heroine a former dominatrix, a woman cast out of polite society, who took to prostitution to survive, and now has made enough money to retire. She also carries a big grudge which is where the story gets to be fun. (Cross your fingers my editor likes this idea!)

Anyway, I thought I better do some research on historical dominatrixes, and did what I usually do: Google.

I came up with Theresa Berkley, who ran a brothel devoted to flagellation during the Regency period, and who apparently invented or commissioned the Berkley Horse, which enabled her to whip anybody, well, on any part of the body. I have yet to find a picture or a good description of this, which means I get to use my imagination!

However, the reference to her was awfully circular. From Wikipedia to the Deviant’s Dictionary entry on flagellation and back again, the text identical, and all referencing the same book.

Right, says I. Let’s see this book then. So a copy of it finally arrived on Saturday. I haven’t had a chance to read much of it yet, but this source book, Index of Forbidden Books is not that list that the Catholic Church once prohibited (although I’m sure all these books are on there) but a list of Victorian erotica complete with reviews, and with lots of side-trip details, like talking about the madams of various brothels, or sharing a short story. No pictures, alas, and the only extant copy of it seems to be a Sphere 1969 imprint, although Wikipedia again tells me that the original is in the British Library or Museum or somewhere. So I think it’s the real deal.

It still feels a bit circular to me, but the author is the guy they think wrote or edited My Secret Life, about a young Victorian man’s womanizing. And that book’s credentials have been proven.

In any case, the Index of Forbidden Books is cool in that it dips back to pre-Victorian erotica, and so we get to learn about women like Mrs. Theresa Berkley. Who in the code parlance of the day is known as a “governess”. Which phrase I get to have fun with in my current WIP.

Anyway, here are some titles plucked randomly from Index of Forbidden Books:

PRETTY LITTLE GAMES for Young Ladies and Gentlemen. With Pictures of Good Old English Sports and Pastimes, by T. Rowlandson, 1845. (Yes, that Rowlandson).

MEMOIRS OF ROSA BELLEFILLE: or, A Delicious Banquet of Amorous Delights! Dedicated to the Goddess of Voluptuous Pleasure, and her soul-enamoured votaries. (Ashbee’s review begins: “This is an insipid, tiresome book...”)

THE ADVENTURES OF AN IRISH SMOCK. Interspersed with Amatory Anecdotes of a Nankeen Pair of Breeches. By Terence O'Tooleywag, Esq.

MADAME BIRCHINI’S DANCE. A Modern Tale, With Considerable Additions, and Original Anecdotes collected in the Fashionable Circles. Now first published by Lady Termagent Flaybum.


OK, so somebody’s got to name they’re crazy aunt this or something similar!

I'm glad that the titles I made up for the erotica library in SHOW ME weren't too out of line!

Well, I guess I better stop blogging and resume work on this proposal. I decided on Friday to cut everything except the first half of the first chapter. This is what we call a “false start”, or if you’re under deadline (which I’m not currently), it’s called “Oh sh--t!”

Mothers...

Pam's blog yesterday (and Celia's earlier) reminded me of the time my younger brother asked my mother if her generation had sex before marriage.

I'm sure he thought: How could they? They're old. Stodgy. That sort of thing couldn't have happened back then. My mother, who grew up in England in the 1940s, gave this response: "There was a war on. What do you think?" As Celia said, we didn't invent this stuff.

Anyway, that started me thinking about mothers. My mother-in-law passed away earlier this week. It was very sad and it hurts very deeply. A former schoolteacher, she loved history, and whenever she'd visit, she would pull out some of my research books to read. Not the naughty ones, but ones on women's lives in Georgian and Regency England. She knew I wrote, but I was not quite prepared to reveal to my mother-in-law and my parents that I write erotic romance.

It was easy as an unpublished author. Then I sold.

For months, I tried to walk a tightrope over a pit of doom. I had revealed to both my mother-in-law and my parents that I'd sold six books. Unfortunately, I just couldn't keep the news to myself. It was the sort of thing that just wants to burst out or, at the very least, leak out when you least expect it. Then I had to quickly add that my books were well…hot and spicy. It wasn't too bad, I thought. If I didn't give my pen name, they couldn't actually read me. So I tried to artfully avoid giving my pseudonym, and that worked fairly successfully. But this last Christmas I was finally 'outted'. My husband and I were bundling up my promotional excerpt/calendars over Christmas. And when we went off to bed, my mother-in-law took one to read. Since these were intended for mailing, the excerpt was mild. Reasonably mild. But still…

Anyway, she loved it. She was a wonderful champion of my writing, even though other family members warned her that maybe she shouldn't tell her bank teller, her friends, her financial advisor, and the rest of the relatives. But regardless, news of my releases went into her Christmas cards.

I've been very fortunate to have a mother-in-law who was proud of my work and happily tooted my horn. I'm going to miss her very much. This isn't really a historically centered post, but I'd like to say that I hope for all of you, in any endeavor, that you have someone just as supportive behind you!

(The picture at the top is from www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/rgsewing.gif.)

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.

Do they mean us?

Alas, the image doesn't have a lot to do with my post, unless we count father's sending daughter's to the right school, but in our quest to find portraits of real Regency men, here is the artist with his daughter. Isn't he fine?

My post takes me back to my favorite place, Ackermann's Repository of Arts, Literature and Fashions. In this case, September 1823. I finally got the opportunity to bid on a complete Ackermanns' magazine and I have it in front of me. It's very tatty but has all the prints and the text which usually gets thrown away. On the cover is a hand-written signature which is hard to decipher but it starts with Rev-which I assume means a clerical gentleman once owned this fine piece of literature.

Reading through the variety of articles and advertisements I was struck with how many of them were relevant to today. Adverts for insurance, hair products, soap, discussions about boys being boys, deliveries of Irish lace, miraculous potions to make your hair grown again and a great deal of humor.

My favorite article will definitely appeal to the crumpet strumpets. It's entitled: "Prospectus of a New Institution for the Formation of Wives" When I started to read it I thought it was a fabulous example of how feminism had changed our lives-and then I read on and realized it was definitely 'tongue in cheek' Basically it suggests that women were getting too educated and too uppity and that a new school headed by Madames Sober and Steady were resolved to turn out perfect wives. Here's a snippet.

"It cannot be denied that many women have distinguished themselves in the field of literature: still it must be admitted that this is not their proper scene of action...A learned wife may be considered about as useless a member of society as a learned pig. Indeed, the latter may be looked upon as the less injurious of the two; for all the loss the bluestocking grunter occasions to society...But the hapless progeny of a learned human mother must pine in ignorance and neglect while mama is preparing pap for babies of a larger growth or in reading for her evenings exhibition before a select circle of savans."

Ouch. Are they talking about us?

It suggests a school where young ladies fill their heads with more useful wifely tasks. I love this bit:
"Those fingers that once handled the goose-quill only, will then be permitted to explore the inmost recesses of the noble biped which furnished it."
Eew-gross!

And of course, we must all agree with this:
"Obedience to the lawful authority of man is among the first principles implanted in the minds of the young ladies intrusted to Mesdames S. and S. and they are accordingly brought up in the utmost reverence for the lords of creation, whom they are taught to consider as beings of a higher order"

Are they talking about Men?
Excuse me while I burn some feathers under my nose to revise me from my swooning fit of excessive laughter.

Finally, here's the fees list-complete with additions:
Board and Education 40 G's (guineas)
Lectures in domestic economy 10 G's
Higher branches of cookery 10 G's
Writing ,arithmetic and family accounts 6 G's
Roast beef and Plumb pudding master 6 G's
Butcher's lessons 4 G's
Drill-serjeant 4 G's
Ornamental needlework 4 G's
Lessons in washing and getting up fine things 4 G's
Curry powder by private lessons*
Entrance to the house 2 guineas, to the kitchen 1 guinea, to the larder 1 guinea and to each of the masters 2 G's.
N.B In addition to the articles usually brought by young ladies to school, it is expected that they be provided with, three pair of pockets, three large high aprons, a well stored housewife, a pin cushion, a clasp-knife and a nutmeg grater.
*This will be found extremely serviceable to young ladies intended for the Indian market."

Oh please...can I send my sons there?

Soothing the Savage Breast

Did that catch your attention? (wicked cackle).

What music turns you on or inspires your writing?

I like to write to opera, so Saturday afternoons, when the Met broadcast is on, are a very important time for me. Operas are about passion and over the top emotions and dying twice in a sack, so they seem a natural pairing with erotic romance. And there's something powerful and transcendent about the sheer athleticism and strength of the trained operatic voice, so Handel's Messiah is another biggie for me.

I also like the crossover recording For The Stars by mezzo-soprano Ann Sofie von Otter (who can sing in just about any way she wants) and Elvis Costello (who can sing like Elvis Costello).

In instrumental music I love Krystian Zimerman's recording of the Rachmaninov and Chopin piano concertos, passionate, melancholy, dramatic music. And there's a Duke Ellington recording I'm very fond of that my daughter seems to have spirited away.

How about you?