"Milk"--and bringing an historical world to life

Happy New Year! Hope everyone had a wonderful holiday season. I had a fabulous time celebrating with friends and family and indulging in a couple of my favorite holiday (and non-holiday) activities--shopping (the sales were amazing even if I was on more of a budget than usual) and going to the movies. I saw two wonderful movies, Doubt (as thought-provoking on film as when I saw it in the theater) and Milk. Milk was shattering, left me in tears, and to me felt much more immediate than a lot of bio-pics do. Of course it didn't hurt that I remember a lot of the events vividly. The Prop 6 campaign, and my mom saying "not that I'm worried about who teaches my daughter, but if I was worried I'd be a lot more worried about heterosexual men." One of my classmates (who must have heard it on the radio, because we didn't have tv at school and it was way before radio) bursting into my 7th grade class with the news that San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk had been assassinated. Going home and asking my parents why it had happened and "what happens now?"

But it was one particular cinematic view in Milk that really took me back in time. In the mid-to-late 70s, my mom and I often spent weekend afternoons at the Castro Theater, seeing old movies (no VCRs yet). We usually parked on the other side of Market Street and walked down the hill to the theater. There's one shot in Milk, down that hill, showing the theater marquee, that took my breath away because it looked so like what I remembered.

And that, I realized, is part of what we try to do as historical novelists--recreate the past so vividly that the reader feels she or he has stepped back into an historical era. It isn't easy. Usually we're writing about eras far beyond our memory and often in far away places. Even if we're able to visit the setting of our books, inevitably the scene has changed. The production team for Milk worked hard to recreate the San Francisco of the 70s. Two of my friends were extras in the movie. They were briefed on how to dress to fit the era and watched the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk before they shot the scenes they were in (they also talked to people who had known Harvey Milk who said Sean Penn was so like him it was uncanny). I was at a party in the Castro neighborhood the day before I saw the movie, so the difference between the way the neighborhood looked in the movie and the way it looks today was vivid. The marquee of the Castro Theater looks different, signs were changed, old storefronts and restaurants recreated.

As a novelist, I do a similar sort of "set dressing" in my head. I've spent quite a bit of time sitting in Berkeley Square, looking at the house that's my mental image for Charles and Mélanie's house and the Georgian houses next to it (pictured above), imagining the square lined with similar houses, the plane trees younger, the red telephone booth gone, phaetons and barouches and curricles in place of cars, Regency-dressed children their nurses playing in the park. I walk down London Street mentally editing out the Victoriana (and anything later), trying to blend the sights before me with period engravings of how the street in question looked in the era of my books. I go into country houses that have been redone through the centuries and try to imagine them before post-Regency embellishments.

Have you visited the locations in your books (or looked at contemporary photographs) and tried to mentally "set dress" them to the era you're writing about? Have you seen Milk? If you lived through the era, did it feel authentic? If don't remember the time and events, did you find the movie compelling? Other holiday movies you found memorable?

Around the World in 1001 Days

You remember Magellan? The intrepid explorer we learned about in 5th grade who sailed around the world and proved the earth wasn’t flat?

My 5th grade teacher took a rather ho-hum approach with that event, but it could have been indelibly stamped on little minds if only she had told us the truth! Such a riveting tale would have created life-long readers and devotees of history.

Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese mariner who migrated to Spain when he couldn’t get backing for his proposed route to the Spice Island, was a knowledgeable, tough, steadfast, far-sighted, skilled mariner and navigator. He was also autocratic, arrogant, and unbending, but steadfastly loyal to King Charles of Spain, who didn’t really trust him because of the escalating rivalry between Portugal and Spain.

In 1518, Magellan convinced Charles to back his sailing venture, and in 1519 he set off in his armada of five black ships to either find the route to the Spice Islands (Moluccas) or drop off the edge of the world. The Trinidad (the only full-sized caraval), San Antonio, Concepcion, Victoria, and the Santiago were manned by diverse crews of Italians, Portuguese, Spanish, Flemish, and one Englishman. Each ship had three masts, one of which carried a lateen sail. And each ship had a sub-commander who reported to Magellan on his flagship, The Trinidad.

Problems arose even before they had sailed away from Seville on the Guadalquivir River and then west into the open sea. The Portuguese sailors resented being bossed by Magellan, who was himself Portuguese but had declared loyalty to Spain. By the time the five ships gained the southern reaches of South America, many sailors had had enough of Magellan’s high-handed tactics and single-minded adherence to his mission, to say nothing of his harsh punishments, and they mutinied.

Only two ships remained loyal. Magellan cleverly divided the remaining three and conquered each by a combination of diplomacy and chicanery. One ship, however, The San Antonio, turned tail and sailed for Spain. Their excuse, as the captain explained later to King Charles, was that Magellan was cruel and incompetent. Their version of the mutiny and the punishments that followed was falst, but believed.

The resentful but cowed crews on the remaining ships continued the search for the fabled “passage” through the tip of South America, sailing up one promising-appearing river, then back down when the waterway dead-ended. By this time food was running out, the men were frightened and muttering, and Magellan was getting desperate. Finally they stumbled upon a marshy, unearthly muddle of bays and bends and twists which eventually spewed them out into the Pacific Ocean.

Scurvy now attacked the crews with swollen gums and internally disintegrating cartilege so that bodies literally “fell apart.” All except Magellan and his top two officers were afflicted; a coveted jar of quince jam, shared a teaspoonful a day among these three men, protected them from scurvy, though they didn’t know it at the time.

Sick, hungry, exhausted, and rebellious, the sailors of the armada limped into the Philippine Islands where they rested and repaired the leaking ships. Then Magellan single-mindedly drove his ships on to other island chains, which he found full of “ugly pagans” who nevertheless gave them food and shared their women. Up to a point. Magellan by this time was afflicted with a messianic urge to convert the pagans, and he set about baptizing them en masse. In so doing, he made a fatal mistake: he burned one resistant village, and in retaliation the natives attacked.

They hacked Magellan to pieces on the beach. The frightened crews left him to his fate, chose another commander and sailed on to the Spice Islands. The new commander was a good seaman but not a good navigator, and many unfortunate seafaring disasters occurred: one ship was damaged so that a crew had to hand-pump continuously 24/7 to keep it from sinking. The Trinidad did sink, and still another was burned on purpose so it wouldn’t fall into the hands of the Portuguese, who, because of the squabble over Portuguese and Spanish land rights and sea routes, had sailed off to catch Magellan.

Magellan had a chronicler on board, one Antonio Pigafetti, an amateur anthropologist, who became fascinated with the native customs on the (sometimes cannabalistic) islands visited; he was especially interested in the custom of “panang,” in which the penis is lengthened, pierced with bolts and enlarged with small stones. (The native women said they preferred the European men.) Pigafetti kept meticulous records of the events of the voyage, right down to creating phonetic brochures of the various languages spoken.

Now reduced to two ships, the weary, sick men did manage find the Spice Islands (the Moluccas) and loaded up with tons of cloves and cinnamon while their hosts assured them they “would not tell the Portuguese.” On the arduous way home, back through the tortuous strait the way they had come (now called the Strait of Magellan), one of the two remaining ships ran aground and sank.

But in 1522 the Victoria, the only ship remaining afloat after three grueling years at sea, struggled back up the Guadalquivir River to Seville; 260 men had sailed away on five ships; only 18 men and one ship had completed the voyage to circumnavigate the earth.

According to Laurence Bergreen’s Over the Edge of the World, the day after arriving “the eighteen European survivors, attired only in their ragged shirts and breeches, did penance.... Walking barefoot, holding a candle, [commander] Elcano led the gaunt, weary pilgrims through Seville’s narrow, winding streets to the shrine of Santa Maria de la Victoria, where the survivors, shell-shocked, tentative, chastened by all they had seen and experienced... knelt to pray.”

The crew was initially jailed but later exonerated as the fabrications of the San Antonio’s crew were challenged and disproved; then the survivors headed for their homes, most of them unaware they had made history.

Autre Temps, Autre Moeurs

One of the lovely things about knowing lots of historians (an inevitable result of being a lapsed grad student) is getting to hear all about other peoples' research. Over drinks the other day, a friend of mine filled me in on the lurid details of an adultery trial that had taken place in the prim and proper world of mid-nineteenth century Boston. The topic of the incredible importance of reputation arose, not just that of the accused adulterer, but of the unmarried woman who had been dragged to the stand as his, er, partner in crime.

"Think of it," my friend pointed out. "Her reputation was ruined. Who would marry her? Without marriage, what was she to do?"

What, indeed?

Attending an all girls school in the 80’s, I was taught that the definition of ambition was to do whatever the guys did—- only do it better. Sure, there were such things as husbands and children, but snagging Mr. Darcy was viewed as decidedly retrograde. This attitude tends to creep backwards into our opinion of the ladies of the past. Recently, I've noticed heroines in novels undertaking increasingly bizarre occupations. Certainly, there have been women in all time periods who undertook a wide spectrum of activities, from writing scholarly tracts to running successful businesses (another friend wrote a dissertation on late medieval lady merchants), but, for the most part, the measure and means of ambition in the pre-modern world was marriage.

I use the term ambition advisedly. Nowadays, we tend to view marriage as the antithesis of ambition, or, at least, as unrelated to it. But what was an ambitious woman to do in 1803? What were the fastest routes to power and influence? Put quite simply, marriage. Lady Catherine de Burgh wouldn’t wield such influence were she a spinster of the parish; as the widow of a magnate, commanding vast resources she can make the Mr. Collinses of the world cower. Less fictionally, Lady Hertford, Lady Holland, and, in a slightly earlier era, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire were all able to play powerful roles in the politics of their day because of the possibilities placed at their disposal by the marriages they had made.

I dealt with this issue extensively in my last book, The Seduction of the Crimson Rose. In Crimson Rose, my heroine finds herself in an impossible position. Had she been born in the twentieth century, she would have attended Wharton and been CEO of a company. As it is, her ambition has no other outlet but to marry and to marry as well as she can. As Mary herself muses, in an early chapter, What else, after all, was there to do? She didn’t have it in her to be a bluestocking and write dour tracts. She had no interest in educating other peoples’ brats. The days when a woman could make a career as a royal mistress had long since passed.... Mary had always thought she would make an excellent monarch—the skills required for international diplomacy were much the same as those that Mary used to keep the various members of her entourage in check—but no one had had the consideration to provide her with a kingdom. There was only game to be played so Mary played it and, she had always thought, played it well.

When Mary finds herself balked of the match she had intended to make, it is not her heart that is in danger but her livelihood. With no source of independent income, she will be forced to subsist on the charity of her relatives. The bargain Mary strikes with the hero, offering her services as a spy in exchange for the money to fund another Season, is viewed by both in the nature of a business investment. Mary describes it so herself in discussion with Lord Vaughn, when she likens herself to a “young man who begs the cost of a commission or a sea captain in want of a ship”. In other words, venture capital.

Nor was it only women for whom marriage was the measure of ambition. Despite our modern preconceptions, marrying for money was not a gendered pursuit. The key to the question pertains not to gender, but to class. The aristocratic class was a leisured class, and proud of it. The stigma against work applied to men as well as women, cutting off their alternatives as it did their sisters'. True, the gentlemen did have some extra options open to them. There was the army or the priesthood-- if one could muster the money for a military commission or find someone to provide an ecclesiastical living. But other forms of sustained and gainful employment were as closed to them as to my heroine, unless one were willing to endure the resulting decline in status.

In the end, marrying for money was the preferred choice for many impecunious gentlemen, whether the lady was willing or not. Kidnapping heiresses and forcing them into wedlock became such an industry in the 18th century that in 1753 Parliament passed Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, instituting stringent measures for the legality of marriages, including mandatory parental consent for parties under the age of twenty-one, banns to be called in church, and the acquisition of a marriage license. Since the Act exempted Scotland, a new industry was born across the border: gentlemen would take their heiresses and flee to the Scottish town of Gretna Green, where the marriage laws were less stringent.

In that context, the husband-hunting of nineteenth century set novels takes on a very different complexion. It is not a frivolous pursuit, but a matter of personal advancement, in some cases, even of survival.

Happy Holidays!

Whatever your traditions for this season, we here at History Hoydens wish you a wonderful season of celebration. We'll be back with more history, more books, and more book-related chitchat on January 5th.

Medieval English Carols

The English expression of the medieval carol is unique, and I say this from my own experience; I have sung and played many of these carols in medieval music ensembles, and there is a distinctly different, emotionally gripping feel to the songs. In medieval England, the carol is more external, more in-this-world oriented, than mystical in its religion. With little deep individual feeling, the caroller sings as a member of the human race, one who is cursed by death.





Fuweles in the Frith





Fuweles in the frith,

The fishes in the flood,

And I must waxe wood,

Much sorw I walke

With the best of bon and blood.





(Fowls in the woodland, the fishes in the waters,

And I must make woe;

Much sorrow I walk with, for best of bone and blood)







Salvation is more an objective, external thing than a spiritual process. Many carols are prayers, expressed in song, for a safe , and a good death:





St. Godric ’s Vision





Sainte Nicolaes, Godes drud,

Tymbre us faire scone hus;

At the burth, at thi bare

Sainte Nicolaes, Bring us wel thire.





(St. Nicholas, God’s darling, graciously prepare for us beautiful dwellings.

At the birth, at the bier,

St. Nicholas, bring us safely there.)





And sometimes the religious carol is little more than a gay pastoral song:





The shepard upon a hill he satt;

He had on him his tabard and his hat,

His tarbox, his pipe, and his flagat;

His name was called Joly Joly Wat,

For he was a gud herdes boy,

Ut hoy!

For in his pipe he made so much joy.



Many traditional carols are creations of wandering goliards, who interwove Latin with English words. Here’s one from the 15th century:



Make We Joy (an Epiphany carol)



Make we joy now in this feast.

In quo Christus natus est: E-ya!

A Patre unigenitus,

Through a maiden is come to us,

Sing we of him and say

Welcome.

Veni Redemptor gentilum."



Another type of carol is the "traditional" song, whose origins are probably pagan–hence, inclusion of some puzzling lyrics . One such is "The Holly and the Ivy":



The Holly and the Ivy



The holly and the ivy

When they are both full grown,

Of all the trees that are in the wood,

The holly bears the crown.



Chorus: The rising of the sun, And the running of the deer,

The playing of the merry organ, Sweet singing in the choir.



Such carols celebrate nature’s cycle of life and predated Christian usage. Holly was revered because it stayed green all year long. The reference to "the running of the deer" in particular refers to the ancient ceremony of "deer running," once a mid-winter ritual dance of the hunt. Eight men, holding reindeer antlers above their heads, and accompanied by the traditional (pagan) folk Fool, the Man-Woman, Hobby Horse and Boy Hunter, process through the village and outlying farms, "bringing in the luck."



There are no words to this haunting tune, (called "Abbots Bromley Horn Dance Tune") but I have played the lilting melody line in a recorder ensemble; the music is evocative and a has a definite "spooky" feel.



Another such song, "Apple Tree Wassail," comes from a pagan winter solstice ritual performed at night by firelight to ensure new growth in the fruit trees. Old cider (and sometimes ashes from the Yule log) was poured at the base of the tree, and the accompanying singing and dancing was punctuated with loud banging noises and shouts to drive away evil spirits. The "carol" was performed by joining hands and singing while dancing in a ring around a bush, or a May tree (from which evolved the May pole).



Apple Tree Wassail





Old apple tree, we’ll wassail thee,

And hoping thou wilt bear;

The Lord does know where we shall be

To be merry another year.

To blow well and to bear well,

And so merry let us be;

Let every man drink up his cup:

Here’s health to the old apple tree.



Shouts at the conclusion: Capfulls! Hatfulls! Baskets full!

Bushels full! Barrels full! Barn floors full!

—and a little heap under the stairs!



With the gradual absorption of old pagan ritual into Christian rites, such carols passed on into festivals honoring not only nature, but Christ the Lord, the Virgin Mary, and many saints.



Sources: The Christmas Revels Songbook (Langstaff); The Oxford Book of Carols (Oxford University Press); Christmas Customs and Traditions (Clement Miles); and The Mediaeval Stage (E.K. Chambers).

The King O'er the Water

It is a well-known fact that the grass on the other side is always greener. Perhaps it’s equally true that the prince on the other side of the water—or the throne—is invariably more dashing. I write, of course, of Bonnie Prince Charlie, onetime Pretender to the English throne and the ongoing epicenter of enough adulation to make even a modern rock star jealous. (Although, to be fair, it didn’t take much to be more dashing than George II. Those Hanoverians weren’t exactly known for their looks.)

Known as Bonnie Prince Charlie or the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart was the grandson of James II of England, who had been drummed off the throne after a three year reign by his own daughter, Mary, and her husband, William of Orange, in a little event we all know as the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Raised in exile in Italy, the young prince sailed to Scotland in 1745, at the age of twenty-five, to raise the clans against the Hanoverian King, George II. The rebellion was brutally squished and the Bonnie Prince spent some time skulking about the Highlands before making it back to safety on the Continent. He died in 1788, a broken and disappointed man, who reputedly said of his erstwhile supporters, “I will do for them what they did for me, I shall drink their health”.

What is it about Bonnie Prince Charlie that has elicited such adulation across the centuries? His father, the Old Pretender, led a failed rebellion, too: the ’15 to Bonnie Prince Charlie’s ‘45. Yet one never sees Bonnie Prince Jimmy novelty candy boxes being sold along Princes Street in Edinburgh. It’s always that rascal of a Charlie, sometimes paired with Flora MacDonald (it depends on the size of the candy box).

When you look closely at Charles Edward’s life, it doesn’t bear up with romantic legend. Fond of the bottle, he deteriorated into alcoholism after the collapse of his cause, ruining both his temperament and the profile so beloved of his early portraitists. The drinking proved too much for his common law wife, Clementina Walkinshaw, who left him, taking their daughter with her. In 1772, Charles contracted a formal marriage with a German princess, Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. She left him, too, citing physical cruelty. Not exactly the picture of a prieux chevalier, eh?

Amanda wrote last week about historical saints and sinners, the reputations that have followed various characters through the ages, deserved or not. In Bonnie Prince Charlie’s case, it is the legend of that charming twenty-five year old that has survived, not the reality of the man he became. Wrapped about in myth and legend, he came to encapsulate all the romance of the Lost Cause, wrapped in a kilt and tied in a tartan bow.

Are you a Bonnie Prince Charlie partisan or a Charlie skeptic? Which historical icons leave you cold?

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?