I’m another animal lover who always stops and holds my breath when I see a graceful deer behind my house, even if it’s munching my shrubs. I love watching hummingbirds and never cease to be amazed at how fast chipmunks can move with those little short legs. I sort of like squirrels, but that’s tempered by the fact they made me give up feeding the birds because the little sneaks totally defeated my squirrel-proof feeders. Continue reading

Regency visual artists were about half way along the technological journey between the Neolithic Cave painters and one of those high-tech computer painting programs. The fine work, the beautiful work, the Regency artists created was accomplished with the most simple tools and a limited array of colors. Continue reading

Wenches Joanna and Mary Jo will be signing books in Charlottesville, Virginia this Saturday morning, March 23, as part of the five-day Virginia Festival of the Book. Final The Romance portion of the Festival is an all-day event with more than a dozen Romance writers. We'll be on the 10 am panel -- Harridans & Hoydens: Researching Independent Women in History and Historical Romance, with Romance writers Grace Burrowes and Kristen Callihan and with historical biographer Jehanne Wake. Continue reading

asking the Wenches the somewhat harrowing question -- "Do you get angsty and anxious at any part of the writing process? And, if you do, does it make you more productive?" Continue reading

Regency streets would have been fairly active and interesting places, what with knife grinders, pot menders and chimney sweeps, milkmaids and streets sellers hawking everything from cherries to hot codlins -- not to mention the miscellany of enterprising pickpockets and cut purses and those generally operating on the windy side of the law.

 Exciting, those Regency streets. Continue reading

There have always been songs and dances celebrating the winter solstice and, indeed, all the other high points of life in the community. The word 'carol' originally meant a circle dance. Songs that were recognizably in celebration of Christmas and sung by the community in the local language, (as opposed to liturgical music in church,) date back to the Middle Ages. A Shropshire chaplain listed twenty-five 'caroles of Christmas' in 1426. I got to wondering which Christmas carols my Regency characters might have sung. Continue reading

Books are a joy in good times and a comfort in bad ones. More than once I've been delighted to dive between the pages of a book and let the world get on without me for a while, me not being fond of what the world is up to right then. This last couple weeks on the East Coast of America lots of folks have found themselves crouching down under the pounding of a hurricane. I wondered how many of them were reading books by the flickering and uncertain light of candles. So I asked the Wenches about their own experiences with storms and whether they had book recommendations for times of stormy weather. Continue reading

What you had in Britain was just a whole variety of fostering, indenture, wardship, guardianship, apprenticeship, and various less-formal-arrangement-ships . . . but nothing that put the child on an equal footing with children born in a marriage. So how did they manage the whole orphaned-child problem? Ordinary working folk, from simple decency or from a desire for another pair of working hands, would often take in a neighbor's child when the parents died. Continue reading

One of the sad realities about spies in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries is that much of the spying they engaged in was against their own countrymen. The English crown certainly worried about the French armies milling about across the Channel. However, they were somewhat more terrified of the disaffected at home and spied upon them diligently. Continue reading

Because I write about spies — some of them women — and because spies have a not-totally-unmerited reputation for violence, I decided to look into Regency women and acts of violence and mayhem they might have got up to. Generally, I'd noticed a lack of references to women duking it out or poking each other with fencing foils or shooting holes in each other with pistols at dawn in a formalized way. I though maybe this was common sense on the women's part. Continue reading

any day of the simmering summer is incomplete without a book in the bag. Or a couple books, since you never know exactly how the spirit will move you. Summer reading needs the background noise of kids running around barefoot and yelling about nothing at all. It needs a shady porch or umbrella and maybe a dragonfly hovering just off the port side of the hammock. Continue reading

In the Matthew Macfadyen / Keira Knightley 2005 production of Pride and Prejudice, there's a scene where Mr. Darcy is writing a letter, despite Miss Bingley's determination he shall pay attention to her instead. This 'writing slope' is a wood box with an angled surface, elevated a couple inches above the desk or table, slanted and padded with felt or leather. Continue reading

The hard-drinking Regency or Georgian gentleman is such a stock figure in Romance, it's worth stopping a minute to wonder what sort of liquor he was likely to be imbibing. There was ale and beer, of course, and their cousin, porter. Ale and beer weren't precisely a gentleman's drink, but it's likely your hero lifted a mug of ale before the hunt and he may well have drunk beer with his breakfast, especially if he lived in the deep country. Continue reading

What do Vauxhall, the court of Queen Elizabeth, Cuper's Gardens, (which is described intriguingly as "the scene of low dissipation . . . and the great resort of the profligate of both sexes" — rather like our local mall,) the celebration of the wedding of George III, and Kensington Gardens have in common? Fireworks. Big, bright rockets and Catherine wheels and crackers. Fireworks were the sound and light show of the Eighteenth Century. The extravaganza that marked all great and festive events. Continue reading

The fashionable streets of Mayfair are fairly easy to picture. We have lovely paintings of these, for one thing. The wide, clean, quiet streets with expensive houses. The squares, maybe with a garden in the middle. Yes. I can see these. I have some feeling of what the rookeries might have looked like too. The grainy, mid-Victorian photos of the London slums give us an idea. Hogarth illustrates the underbelly of London on one side of the era. Gustaf Dore on the other. Continue reading

Joanna here, celebrating the holidays in Paris. This means cooking filets of duck, new potatoes, and little bitty baby cauliflowers 'au fromage' on a tiny two-burner stove on Christmas Eve. I had just about forgotten how to cook with this sorta minimum equipment. Continue reading

Talking about eyeglasses in the Regency period. 

In the early 1700s a London spectacles maker named Edward Scarlett advertised a clever solution. His glasses came with folding hinged struts and two arms to hold the optics onto the head. There were even loops, sometimes, to tie the glasses on. Now your spectacles didn't fall off every time you incautiously reached for a new sheet of paper. It became practical to walk around wearing the things. All this improvement in eyeglass technology meant people could pay intelligent attention to where they were going. This lasted till the invention of the ipod. Continue reading

Talking about eyeglasses in the Regency period. 

In the early 1700s a London spectacles maker named Edward Scarlett advertised a clever solution. His glasses came with folding hinged struts and two arms to hold the optics onto the head. There were even loops, sometimes, to tie the glasses on. Now your spectacles didn't fall off every time you incautiously reached for a new sheet of paper. It became practical to walk around wearing the things. All this improvement in eyeglass technology meant people could pay intelligent attention to where they were going. This lasted till the invention of the ipod. Continue reading

Finally, this is Adrian's story. I don't know about anyone else, but I'm relieved the boy finally has his happy ending. We've met Hawker as a secondary character in the other books. He's Hawker, or Adrian Hawker, or sometimes Sir Adrian Hawkhurst, depending who he's pretending to be and who he wants to impress. He is deadly and sarcastic and maybe a bit too fond of sticking knives into people. Naturally he has the making of a Romance hero. Continue reading

So the burning question of the hour is — did girls bowl hoops, or was it only a sport for boys? Anytime after about 1830, we see girls depicted with a hoop and stick. An example is the charming Renoir at the top of the page. In the last half of the Nineteenth Century, hoop rollers are as apt to be girls as boys. Victorian moralists and physicians considered it wholesome, healthy exercise for young girls. But what about in the Regency? What about the Georgian era? Continue reading

In England, in this period, folks did their actual getting clean by washing in a basin, or by washing in a tub big enough to sit down in, or by using a little water standing in a medium sized tub. Washing with a pitcher of water would be part of the morning routine, or undertaken again after a long day of work or play. This was what you'd expect to find waiting for you in a decent inn. This was the normal way folks got clean. Continue reading

. . . talking about an interesting sort of drinking glass our hero and heroine might have encountered in their travels through Georgian or Regency England. The Jacobite Drinking Glass. Continue reading

Joanna here, talking about the battle memorials our Regency Folks would have known. Well, we don't know what sort of memorials were raised to fallen soldiers in Britain in the very earliest days. I like to think Silbury Hill might be one of them. Silbury Hill is a huge mound of earth -- chalk and clay -- built on the Salisbury plain near Stonehenge four thousand years ago. I've always wondered if it was homage and memory of some prehistoric leader. Monuments we can date with some certainty go back to the 800s. Continue reading

The Bizarre Byways of Research By Joanna A goodly while ago, Pat Punt asked the Wenches to . . . share some of the strangest trivia they have come across in their research. Having done my share of surfing the 'net, I have encountered many a fact stranger than fiction. Their experience must be even more bizarre. Bizarre does seem an appropriate description for what we come across. From Pat Rice: The only trivia I remember is from my childhood. I play a mean game of 60's Trivial Pursuit. <G> But I just recently wrote about the poisonous green paint... Continue reading

What kind of cats can our characters expect to encounter as they go about their adventures? Lots of cats, for one thing. While Englishmen may love their dogs, the English householder hated his mice and depended on cats to get rid of them. Defoe talks of forty thousand cats in London in the mid-1600s. "Few Houses being without a Cat, and some having several, and sometimes five or six in a House." Continue reading