I have told some of this before, but I was thinking today about what happens when a writer changes the social rules* of the world they’re working in mid-work. Spoiler: it often doesn’t go well.
When I started writing my first Sarah Tolerance book, I drew, among other things, on a book I read when I was a teenager. The name and author of the book are lost to the mists of time: this was a period where I read voraciously, tearing through 5-6 books a week: classics, SF, fantasy, romantic suspense, Regency romances. I was a fairly uncritical reader: mostly I wanted the infusion of story. But even with the volume of story I was ingesting, some critical faculties were beginning to take shape. As you’ll note below, I read a lot of Austen.
So there was this nameless Regency romance. It is nameless and authorless because it irritated me so much that I threw it out when I finished it. Why did it piss me off so badly? It had a really fascinating setup, one that almost transcended the romance genre. Before the book starts, Our Heroine (hereinafter OH), has lived without marriage with a young man (I don’t remember if the decision not to marry was based on some Wollstonecraftian principle).* At the time the book starts, the young man (who sounds like a monster to me) has died, and left OH (who has been cast off by her family after her disgrace) an income and a house–as long as she lives in the town where both she and the young man grew up. Where her shame is, of course, well known.
In the 19th century attitudes were still in the process of shifting from “marriage is about property” to “marriage is (sometimes) about love.” A woman’s marriageability was based on a number of factors: beauty was certainly one. Family property, and family lineage, were two other factors. Virginity was possibly the most important. A young woman who disposed of this crucial factor in her ability to make a good marriage was not only putting her own future in jeopardy, she was screwing up her family’s ability to wed fortune to fortune, or money to real estate, or Valued Lineage to Big Whomping Piles of Cash. Chastity had a dollar (or pound) sign attached. And no one thought it was odd or old-fashioned to think this way. It was okay to marry for love so long as the economics were in your favor; marrying below oneself for love (as Fanny Price’s mother did) had consequences. And sex without marriage could have near-fatal consequences for a well-bred girl.
The family of a “ruined” girl could also suffer consequences. There is a reason why Jane Austen casts Marianne Dashwood’s high-spirited romantic maundering over John Willoughby as irresponsible and dangerous. Marianne not only raises questions about her own reputation, but risks ruining her sisters’ chances as well. A family where a daughter strayed might (as the Bennet family does with the secret help of Mr. Darcy) cover the matter up by arranging a marriage between seducer and seducee. Or they might pension the girl off to live with a companion somewhere away from the family (don’t want her moral lapse to infect other women of the family) and hope that the whole matter is forgotten by a society that lived for this kind of trashy gossip. Or they might cut their losses and cut the girl off. A girl so abandoned had little hope, if her seducer didn’t stick by her, of anything in life other than being someone else’s mistress, and on and on (okay, occasionally someone made it work: Emma, Lady Hamilton is notable–but she also wasn’t a girl of the middle or upper class).
So back to OH, forced to live in a town where people cross the street to avoid her (sin is contagious). And I remember thinking “this is great. How is the author going to resolve this in a satisfactory romance?” And the answer is: she didn’t. By three chapters in, the people in the town were beginning to develop amnesia about OH’s past. Suddenly there were three possible suitors-none of whom made the logical-for-the-time assumption that OH was easy pickings and not marriageable; instead they start squabbling over her. By ten chapters in, the author had begun to treat the remaining few people in town who remembered OH’s moral lapse as fuddy-duddies who are making a fuss about nothing.
WT actual F.
The author didn’t play fair. Maybe she just bit off more than she could chew, and backed away from the gorgeous conflict she’d set up. Or maybe she really didn’t understand the moral complexities of the period, or (worse) decided her readers wouldn’t care, and anyway making it work is hard.
Twenty-five years after I encountered this nameless book, when a co-worker gave me the delicious idea of a “Hard-Boiled Regency” and I began to think about plot and world building, I started thinking about what could be done to rehabilitate that main character in a way I found satisfying. Marriage–while it might be reached at last–was not the first line of rehabilitation. If her family wasn’t going to force her into a marriage to save their reputation, then without a fortune marriage would unlikely. The OH in the book had money and a home (which is more than most young women in her situation had).
Without changing the rules of society, the only thing she can do is wait. Time takes the edge off, particularly if you are seen to be living a blameless life, doing good works and visiting the poor. Mary Crawford suggests in Mansfield Park that Maria Bertram’s scandalous elopement with Henry Crawford can be elided over with time: “In some circles, we know, she would never be admitted, but with good dinners, and large parties, there will always be those who are glad of her acquaintance, and there is undoubtedly more liberality and candor on those points than formerly.” I doubt that the OH would hold good dinners and wait to receive reciprocal invitations. But time–and showing that she is not a different creature from the girl she was before her fall–would likely be the best hope she has.
It’s hard to pull that off in a category romance.
__________
*This setup reminds me forcibly of Dorothy Sayers’s backstory for Harriet Vane in Strong Poison, set in 193o. Even 100 years after Austen, living in sin was still, um, sinful.