On Refilling my Bookshelves: the Romantics in their Time

The room I write in is the nicest in our house. A do-it-yourself add-on built by a former owner, my study has an improvisatory, even a romantic, air to it. Resembling a screened porch at the back of the house, it's wainscoted up to its ceiling, with lots of fanciful if not awfully efficient cabinets and unexpected moldings that probably mask seams in the carpentry.

Best of all (especially for a room in a tiny San Francisco Victorian on a narrow little urban plot of ground) the paneled windows along the back and a side wall let in lots of light and other amusements from our backyard and the ones adjoining. Cats in the shrubbery keep watch on their territories even as they doze, while my glamorous actress/model neighbor modulates from singing torch songs to informing one or another of her little boys that he has to "share that with your brother."

When our visitors get the (necessarily very brief!) front-to-back house tour, this is the last room they see. And they usually breathe something like "ah," or "oh yes" -- windows and woodwork calling attention away from the 1950s crumbling asphalt tile on the floor, the white paint yellowed and threatening to flake off the walls and ceiling.

At least until recently. Though who knows how long we would have gone on that way if an architect friend hadn't murmured, "That tile is made of asbestos, you know."

We hadn't known. We raised our son here, after all. But as of last week, the tile is sealed off by a nice new floor and the walls and ceiling are wonderfully, beautifully repainted.

"Just white," I told Teresa, the housepainter. But Teresa's an artist at what she does and artists don't go for easy answers (they're also more curious -- she's read some of my books and came to my book party).

"There are an infinite number of whites," Teresa told me. "You need to think about this."

And so I did. I thought about the room's northern exposure, the cool blue light that pours in when I'm in the throes of a project and begin writing at dawn or before.

And so the white walls and ceiling now have a pearly sunrise glow; the lower wainscoting is a cool, pale blue-gray; moldings, window frames, cabinets, and bookshelves as pure and bright a clouds-of-glory white as Teresa could manage.

And now that I've seen the room empty for the first time since 1984, I can see where the bookshelves (here, in the hallway that Teresa also painted, even in the nearby kitchen) really should have been. Not to speak of beginning getting intimations of how they should have been arranged.

And so... inevitably (you writers and perhaps some of you readers as well know where this is going, don't you?) I, and Michael too, are undertaking a major rearrangement of our books and shelving all through the house.

As you can see from the books scattered about in the photograph waiting to be categorized, it's a slow process. I need to think about this, I tell myself. It's not wasted time, I insist, it's a shape of the space of my life.

Of the life I share with my husband/research partner/most astute reader. Perhaps it's a holiday gift to ourselves and each other. It's not our custom to exchange anything else this time of year. But I'm finding it delicious to realize a little better every day what I need to read and what I don't, not to speak of what I want to work on next -- together or maybe even with Michael.

But in preparation, we're gathering the books about the history of eros and romance -- even (or especially) in literature and philosophy -- in shared space, in a big mahogany bookcase I once got at an auction.

While as for my study -- luxuriously, I may devote one whole bookcase to to-be-read and check-this-out-again, though part of this may also be given over to indispensable-never-to-be-without.

All the books about Jane Austen go together. Lord Byron. Mary Wollstonecraft.

Fiction and poetry (except for novels directly relevant to what I might be working on) still go on the floor-to-ceiling shelves of our living room, though. Because it's a social space, I guess, for sharing with guests what we most love. And showing off (just a little) what we're made of.

But there will be one fiction shelf in my study devoted to a growing passion of mine: for those novels (some out of print) inspired by that moment in literary history when writers and lovers came together, not only to create the modern horror genres (Frankenstein and also Byron and Polidori's gentleman-vampire) but to live and die too fast, and hence to remain (in Keats' words) "for ever young," forever frustrated, angry, selfish, brave and beautiful...

So far I've got:

Passion, by Jude Morgan. A big, delicious, deeply affecting novel by a British romance writer -- who, btw, turns out to be a guy! In alternating sequences covering a decade or two, Morgan tells the stories of the younger romantic poets, Keats, Shelley, and Byron, by telling the stories of the women in their lives, Fanny Brawne, Mary Godwin Shelley, and (two for Byron) Lady Caroline Lamb and Augusta Byron Leigh, with a brilliant prologue about the literal mother of one of them and the figurative mother of them all (and maybe us as well), Mary Wollstonecraft. All of the stories are beautifully wrought, but if I had to pick a favorite, it would be of Augusta, Lord Byron's half sister and (according to some, though not -- I'm told -- the Byron Society), his lover and the true love of his life. (And thanks again to hoyden Janet Mullany for insisting I schlep this one back home from the 2007 Dallas RWA National conference).

Love's Children, by Judith Chernaik. Constructed in a manner similar to Passion, but on a miniature rather than an epic scale. This one comprises first-person narratives by four of the women in Shelley's life: Mary Shelley, her stepsister Claire Claremont, half-sister Fanny Imlay, and Shelley's first wife Harriet, during the year when Mary was revising Frankenstein. Delicate, perceptive, tragic, a story of erotic and amatory liberation in a time when the risks to women were immense (both Harriet and Fanny committed suicide). I read this one after I'd finished writing The Slightest Provocation, and was fascinated that Chernaik had Mary, Claire, and Percy Shelley angrily reading newspaper accounts of the Home Office provocateuring that constituted the political heart of my novel. And I was deeply amused by Chernaik's portrayal of the dalliance between Shelley and Claire: in The Slightest Provocation, my heroine Mary Penley rebuffs Shelley's advances and advises him to "leave aside the fantasies of communal love and for God’s sake get rid of the stepsister." (Love's Children is out of print, but worth the search)

The Year of December, by Lucy Gores. Lots of readers find Claire, "the stepsister," a shallow, bratty annoyance, but her life and letters tell a more interesting story. Yes, she threw herself at Lord Byron at seventeen and had a daughter, Allegra, by him. But she showed backbone and judgment when she protested his sending the child to an Italian convent school. And one can't help but grieve for her upon learning that five-year-old Allegra died there in a fever epidemic that swept the convent -- and to root for her when she pulled herself together to travel across Europe and work as a governess in Russia. Living a long, productive life and never marrying, Claire remained more faithful to Mary Wollstonecraft's passionate feminism than Mary Shelley did. Gores' fanciful novel (written in 1974 and long out of print) follows Claire to Russia and thrusts her into a radical political intrigue worthy of her, the 1825 Decembrist Uprising against the Tsar. I haven't read this yet, but I love its imagined premise -- and its reminder that the romantic era was bracketed by the French and American Revolutions on one end and the rebellions that swept across Europe for decades on the other.

Imposture, by Benjamin Markovits. I was hot to read this when I posted to this blog about the roots of Regency vampire fiction last September, and I loved Imposture when I read it soon after. Though I will have to admit that the story of John Polidori, who lived and died in Byron's shadow, is so sad that I had to switch off with Christopher Moore's hilarious vampire novel Bloodsucking Fiends. Still, in some ways Polidori survives with honor, as the author of The Vampyre, which originated the gentleman-vampire school of fiction, even if its source was a (less good) story by Byron.

I'm not entirely sure what draws me to the romantics and their little wrinkle in literary/historical time, but I suspect it has something to do with my coming to adulthood in another outrageous, risky era -- the 60s -- and that I feel myself to be part of a collective story that I want to hear from more angles than my own...

...if still in my own newly pearly and glorious writing space.

And so -- perhaps returning to thoughts prompted by Mary's lovely post earlier this week -- do you have a mythic, personal time period, either your own or one in history?

And how about your own space for getting in touch with it?