Hello everyone,
I can’t believe it’s almost Christmas time! I hope the holiday season brings you lots of wonderful family moments, delicious treats, and most of all, some great books in your stockings! 

Speaking of books, (well, this IS a website about books!) I realized recently that I am in danger of breaking a promise, a promise I made about 6 months ago! Remember my blog My Winter Reading List? Well, winter has come and gone in Queensland Australia, and I promised a review of the titles I had ordered. These were The Jane Austen Diet; Jane Austen: Her Life and Letters; and Jan Ellen Delman’s Love’s Perjuries. So without more ado, let’s do this!

I have been reading recently a lot of critical reviews of Bridgerton and I have found it fascinating, although not surprising, at the range of reactions to the show. This post will look at the gamut of emotions the show has inspired, and I will particularly talk about historical accuracy or lack thereof.

Based on a fictional set of novels by Julia Quinn, Bridgerton the televised series spanned one season with another in the works. It is steamy, juicy and opulent, a visual spectacle in terms of the costuming and scenery. It has garnered a lot of interest, and reportedly has an audience of 82 million viewers. However not all viewers were pleased with what they saw. Hardcore regency buffs have been quick to point out the sometimes glaring historical inaccuracies, which a quick google search will find listed in lots of different articles and reviews. As a pure fantasy, however, it excels, and as much as I consider myself a regency buff, I definitely found myself lured in by the sumptuous costuming and entertaining characters, and on that basis willing to overlook the historical inaccuracies.

Die-hard regency buffs have criticized the show for various reasons, not least of which is the ethnic diversity which seems contrived for the greater part. The number of ‘NPC’ non-white characters which inhabit the background scenes, as well as those in the main storyline, is quite large. And when anyone questions the historical accuracy of this particular motif, there seems to be a hysterical response to a genuine enquiry. It got me thinking and wondering, how wrong have we got history? Were there really that many African people in England at the time? Just how black was Queen Charlotte? And if the show appears to address race in its themes, does it actually say anything worthwhile about the issue?

According to popular history, black people numbered around 20,000 in England around the time of the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century. Predominantly, these would have been people in service as footmen, valets, housemaids and the like, or even poorer folk, who had low trades such as seamstresses, staff at inns and cooks and cleaners. Some black people turned to trades such as army, navy and other trades, so a black tradesperson, storeowner, or soldier would not have been so rare that it raised eyebrows. But as for the middle and upper classes, I contend that there were so few people of colour in these realms that to suggest that every third person in a ballroom in London was a finely dressed black male or female, is ridiculous. Certainly there were historically named black figures of rank and wealth: Dido Elizabeth Belle and Queen Charlotte spring to mind. But on the whole, it was unusual to see person of colour who was not of the lower classes.

It can be garnered that black people were still not really thought of as equals, which can be seen from the 1803 illustration below. Entitled ‘Advertisement for a Wife’, the artist has drawn a black woman in the gathering of potential wives for the gentleman on the right. However, if you read the commentaries, the black woman’s supposed thoughts are not very erudite and make fun of her by stereotyping her speech, as she thinks, ‘You be pretty man, Massa’ while the other white figures think using full grammar and proper English. The poor would-be husband also makes it clear that the black woman is not his equal in contending for his hand. “Mercy me, there’s a black among them!”
If this idea that black people are not equal to white people in society, then it is unlikely that the scenes presented in Bridgerton are a faithful representation of society in England—in 1803 at any rate!

A  few months back I revealed my winter reading list, and invited you to share with me your own winter/summer line up, depending on where you are in the world. But while I was writing that post, I began to wonder: if Jane Austen had had access to Amazon, what exactly would she have picked out for herself? (Besides a Thermomix and a Kindle). Just what did Jane Austen read on a rainy afternoon when she wanted to curl up with a glass of hot negus and a good book? If you want to know what negus is there is a blog on my website.

Austen mentions several books that she seems to favour in her letters and novels, as well as ones that she would have been familiar with, including those which she allows her characters to be fans of, so I thought I would make a list of books which she appears to favour – and which she might, if she had had Amazon, have ordered for her own winter/summer vacation reading fare. On researching, I found a really comprehesive list which someone had already compiled, saving me the trouble! It was on a great little website called Bookriot, a book recommendations and literary chat website. I had a look around and it seems like pretty cool place to hang out if you are a book lover. While the purpose of this blog is not usually to talk up other websites, but as a reader myself I could not help being impressed by this one, especially as they had this page on Jane Austen all written up. The link to Bookriot is below, which will take interested readers to the page on Jane Austen, where you can peruse this list and even better, you can apparently download free version of these books. How cool!

https://bookriot.com/who-jane-read-who-read-jane/

Okay, so below is a list of some of the books which Jane Austen was at least familiar with and would likely have read herself. Some of these appear in her letters to family members, and some of them appear as ‘mentions’ in her own novels. I’ve no doubt there would have been many more, (including Pamela, by Samuel Richardson—a long book, and quite didactic in style, and as I recall I think it is epistolary in form, ((letters)) but I really enjoyed it in any case) and other works by the novelists mentioned below. In any case, these are a great start; hopefully, like myself, you will find that there is something satisfying in knowing you are reading something Jane Austen read and enjoyed!

I have always been fascinated by the details of Regency life, and how different or similar it was for a middle-class woman compared to our twenty-first century lives.

For an upper-class woman, of course, there was much more leisure time than there would have been for a lower-middle class woman, since there were, generally speaking less servants, depending upon the household income, and some females would have had to lend a hand with some of the chores, such as helping with setting up the table for meals or perhaps lighter cleaning or hanging out the wash, beating carpets etc. I have often wondered what a day in the life of Jane Austen would look like, so I have done some research, and here is what I have found:

After breakfast, at around 10am, Jane usually worked on her novels, wrote letters, walked, paid or received social calls, pottered in the flowerbeds as she was a keen gardener, or carried out little errands in the town. This period before dinner time, which for the Austens was usually somewhere between 3 and 4pm, was always called ‘morning’. Thus we have the confusion that often arises when people read in novels of the time, about ‘morning calls’. Calls from others or paying calls to another, were always carried out before the dinner hour, and thus the term ‘morning calls’, can be understood to mean a call paid perhaps before 4pm in the afternoon.

After dinner, the family usually took tea together, and remained together for the evening. This time they would spend reading, and Jane would have read aloud parts of her work in progress for critique. This was the time the family might play cards, read riddles (called charades back then) and by 8 or 9pm they would have a light supper and perhaps by 10 or 11pm go to bed. Jane would have enjoyed playing the pianoforte for her family during the evenings also. Sometimes of course, they would prepare to go out, if there was a local dance to attend or a card party at a private house, and for these the girls would spend an hour helping each other do their hair and dress.

I know there are countless excellent writing courses, and lots of them free, which will teach you how to write a romantic novel. When I was thinking, five years ago, about how to begin writing, I googled tons of them…and never used any of them.

It can be counterproductive to try to follow a formula, and that is certainly how I felt after I had researched so many courses, hints and tips. It was overwhelming, and that is why, in a previous post, I talked about how to get started—simply by writing a sentence and taking it one sentence at a time. Pretty hard to get overwhelmed by too much advice when you have no stake in the outcome and just take it bit at a time. This blog I wanted to talk about how to plan—or not—your novel.

Some people might find a course or a bunch of tips, helpful. For myself, feeling as overwhelmed as I was when I first began, I decided not to plan ahead, and my first novel kind of wrote itself. I really just gave up any idea of controlling my pen. I let the characters write their own dialogue, and it seemed to free me up enough to allow a storyline to develop of itself.

In A Scandal at Delford, my first novel, I began with a very simple premise; a girl goes to visit her cousin and ends up in love. The rest of the story evolved as the chapters flew by. I tried to remember to include things I had always enjoyed in Austen and other regency novels; balls, walking in the country, dressing up in regency dress, country life in general, afternoon tea—all those quintessential staples of regency novels which makes them authentic and different from our own twenty-first century lives.

Then I made sure each action led to something—did we learn  more about a character, or a situation, to make that action or event worth including in the story? Its no good writing endless details about how the heroine rode her horse over a park, sat under a tree and rescued a kitten, unless it moves the story forward, unless it serves a purpose. So I made that rule for myself as I went along, and if the action seemed not to be pertinent to the story line, I added in something that made it important, or I cut the writing out and did something different.

One thing you have to get used to is being ruthless when it comes to critiquing your own writing. You must be prepared to determinedly ruthless, and discard anything you find useless or not of the quality you are aspiring to. It can be very hard to cut pet scenes and stuff you toiled over for hours, but if you don’t, you won’t ever be a good writer. Point.

Another trick I discovered which produces creative ideas while writing, is to think on a theme or two, an idea in general, a statement you want to make. Examples might be redemption, weakness, loyalty, grief, cruelty, joy, aging, deceit, etc. Themes or issues give your plot ‘body’ or flesh it out—they give your heroine a mental or emotional challenge to work out. You may not preplan your novel’s storyline in detail, but if you hold a theme or idea in mind which you’d like to explore, scenes will naturally mold themselves to that theme as you work out in the moment how this might be explored in a certain scene or dialogue.

For example, in Beauty and the Beast of Thornleigh, I really wanted to explore the idea of what a hero really is. So my heroine, Georgiana, has to think about why she puts certain men in her life on a pedestal, and how that has affected her attitudes. My hero, Asher Brandt, also confronts heroism and what it is. If you have read this novel, you will remember how this theme recurs in the story. Once you have a theme or two, as you write with that in mind, scenes then develop which bring this idea to the fore, and these scenes bring characters closer to resolving their issues. Writing with this idea in mind, you will find that each scene you write will naturally move the action forward and your scenes will be relevant rather than superfluous to the story.

From there, your storyline becomes more clear as you then realize you could make this or that happen in order to explore this theme further or to make sure your character comes to some kind of understanding by the end of the novel. You may begin your novel with little idea of the story line except a very brief premise, and a theme or two to explore, and by half way you may now have a very clear idea of where it is going to the point where you may have to sit down and make a list of things that need to happen to bring the story to a successful conclusion.

Always resolve your character’s challenges, no matter if they are mental or physical. Always give the reader closure on an idea or theme, by allowing your character to overcome, understand, face, explore, or accept their ‘theme’ issue or challenge.

Something I found really helpful too, is to make sure that even though I don’t exactly know where my plot is leading just yet, my characters are well rounded and have their unusual and interesting quirks; they are not all generic NPCs playing a role. This can then lead to more ideas on scenes and plot lines, which can give cohesion to a story line.

For example, in A Bath Affair, my heroine Clemence is very outspoken, and thinks of her unspoken sharp and witty retorts as bees buzzing in her head, trying to get out. Now my heroine has a quirky personality trait, which makes her more interesting as a character, more authentic as a human, and moves the plot along since she is often saying outrageous and unacceptable things (in a Mayfair drawing room anyway) and leads her to be courageous when the plot calls for it.

There are lots of different ways to generate plotlines and move your story forward and to give it body, but these I have mentioned have really worked for me. Something else may work for you, and that’s fine—the point is to write, and the fun is in the discovering how YOU as a writer, work best.

A quick search on Wikipedia tells us that even back in 2003 there were already over 900 Pride and Prejudice-inspired fan fiction works alone, and who knows what that number is now as I write in June 2021. From sequels and prequels, alternate views and spin-offs, to stand-alone romances in the style of, we are voracious readers, and loquacious writers, of it all. Some of these works seek to emulate or even directly imitate, Austen’s style. Conversely, some take a fair bit of the modern world back to the regency era, in the use of modern language and idiom, and the misrepresentation, deliberate or unintentional, of the historic period in which her works are set.

Despite these differences in style and approach, it cannot be ignored that Austen fan fiction is a now a fully-fledged alternate universe, in and of itself, one where we, the reader, can escape to when the hard realities of life have us yearning for afternoon teas on the lawn, sprigged muslin gowns, silk cravats and waistcoats, candlelit balls, long solitary walks over the moors, and heart-fluttering romances between restrainedly sexy nineteenth-century hotties and babes. This absolute fervour for Austen fan fiction can easily be said to parallel that for other cult followings like Harry Potter, Star Trek and Star Wars, to name a few. So just what is our fascination, as readers and writers, with Austen fan fiction? Why do writers write Austen fan fiction, and why do readers read it? 

As a reader and a writer of Austen fan fiction myself, I would suggest that a large part of this growing fascination for Austen-inspired literature–the spin offs, continuations, sequels and prequels—originates in Austen’s own intense focus on domestic, middle-class English life, manners and culture. There is something which we are attracted to in Austen’s comfortable, cosy world, where fires burn cheerfully and long walks can be had to wile away the endless hours of leisure which denote a middle-class, genteel lifestyle. We are, I suggest, fascinated by the idle, pleasure-seeking lifestyle of the moderately wealthy. Deny it if you will, but consider this: neither the Brontes, nor Dickens nor Hardy, nor any other nineteenth century author who wrote primarily about the poverty-stricken English lower classes, could boast the cult post-humous following which Austen can. I’m not saying that is the only reason for her cult following, but there is a certain charm in being swept away by one’s imagination to an Austenian world where one doesn’t have to worry about having to work, nor where your next dish of roast beef is coming from. Granted, Marianne and Elinor were pretty poor, but even they did not have to work! There is something fascinating in reading about people like us, people who could have been us, and whose lives we could easily slip into, given a time machine and the right muslin gown and spencer. Deny it as much as you like, I hold that we really just want to be them, even if only for a day.

There are few writers who can claim to having created a post-humous cult following, but Jane Austen is one of them. Her novels have inspired literally hundreds of fan-fiction writers, who have gone on to create hundreds upon hundreds of prequels, sequels, spin offs, alternative endings and alternate-view narratives. Thank god, for those of us who cannot get enough Austen, we now have a virtually unlimited supply of novels, novelettes, spoofs and short stories from which to choose.

I have by no means read all or most or even half of these offerings, but for what it is worth, I decided to make a short list of eleven (it was meant to be ten, but I couldn’t pick which one not to mention!) of those works I have read, and would recommend for other Janeites, Austen-lovers, and JAFF-devotees. This is my list only, and it is by no means exhaustive or comprehensive—these are just the ones which spring to mind as ones which I have read and personally loved, for one reason or another.

In no particular order of excellence, I therefore present The List: