Lateness

I’m late with this post because I’ve been wrangling antisemitism again. It’s become worse… again. And so I’m behind on things… again. The good news is that the book I’m writing on how a bunch of people see and share the Jewish history of Germany from before 1700 is reaching the end of a first draft. It may be difficult to find a publisher because things Jewish are not popular right now, but I’ve been exploring how museums and tourist places, and books, and strangers, and community presentative, and historians and archaeologists and even occasional random antisemites are part of how we see the past.

In one way, this is Gillian as she always is. My life revolves around story and history, after all.

In another way, it’s a new path, because I’ve not had the confidence to question some of our big assumptions about who we are and how we came to be. Just today I saw a comment about Ashkenazi Jews not being actually European. I want to revolt when people say things like this, because it shows how very little they know about Jewish history. Most of us were first brought into Europe by the Romans nearly 2000 years ago. Some came earlier, some came later. If we’re not European, then there are a lot of other people counted as European who are not.

The heart of Ashkenazi Jewish culture was formed in what’s now France and Germany in the Middle Ages. Our religion is from the Levant and our religious culture is from the Levant, but our popular culture and how we shape our world is European. yet there are many people who question this and yet accept eastern and central Europeans whose ancestors arrived in Europe far more recently. And I know why this is.

What I haven’t understood is how deeply I and all my teachers accepted the othering. I’m now de-accepting it and discovering that the reason I’m so comfortable analysing English and French and German history is because the heart of Ashkenaz is not only in Germany (I was there last year, exploring for the book) but even Ashkenazi Jewish educational teaching has a French and German heart.

We are both Levantine and European in equal amounts. They’re not separate things, either. There’s not a section of my European ancestral cultures that’s European and another section that is from Jerusalem. There’s a wonderful integration. Maybe I’ll explore this hen I’m finished the five big projects I’m currently engaged in. Or maybe I’ll just sit back and think, “This explains so much.” Last night I explained how much and why to a friend who is a chazan and he was mindboggled because … once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

There are so many reasons I adore research. Being mindboggled is definitely one of them. Also, it’s such a very Jewish thing to experience more and more hate and to turn to learning for comfort.

Farewell to Eden

I’m still in Eden. I leave at 7 am tomorrow and my very nice neighbour just knocked on my door and checked that all is well. I cannot get to the bus stop on foot, you see. It’s over a kilometre and all uphill. She’s lovely and is driving me. We both checked up on bus stops and we both want to make sure I’m there on time and I feel very reassured.
What have I done in Eden? First, I’ve done a truckload of research for a novel to be set here. I have two other novels to finish first, but Eden has such a lovely complex history that it makes the perfect setting. Also, it has a lovely climate, charming and chatty people and once had a Jewish whaler. The killer whales were characters of their own until they moved on for better harvests and… it’s perfect for my weird Australia. I suspected it might be, which is why I spent so much time here.
I don’t have proper access to internet (the wifi is too weak) so the big things, as I said last week, remained undone. I have, however, almost finished three short stories and completely finished 7 short pieces of non-fiction. My Monday and Tuesday will be all about editing, once all this writing is on my own computer.’
What else did I do? Besides walking as far as I could every day (I extended my physical capacity – I’d be very proud of myself if I had extended it to the distance most other people can walk, but I can now walk to my own local shops in Canberra, which is unexpected and good) and chatting with everyone and taking many, many pictures? I’ve been watching The Mysterious Cities of Gold. This was something I needed to see because it answers many questions about children’s television in Australia at about the time I stopped watching children’s television. I grew up on Astroboy and Kimba and The Samurai and The King’s Outlaw and, of course, Star Trek and Doctor Who. Anyone 15-20 years younger than me grew up on The Mysterious Cities of Gold. And other things. When I learn what those other things are, I can analyse them.

My TV viewing was, you see, work. I am trying to work out how hatred is suddenly everywhere. Why we other and mistrust and don’t see the very real lives of our neighbours. It’s very easy to see why I live in a wide world: I watched a Japanese detective series when I was still in primary school. I studied Christina Rosetti when I was in Grade Four. The weather poem was silly and Goblin Market was overwhelming for a 9 year old: I owe Mr Remenyi a lot for letting us grow through poetry.  Furthermore, I could be very rude in Greek when I was in Grade Five. The antisemitism was there (it never fully goes away) but avoiding the toilets while I was at primary school and answering questions like “Why do you drink babies’ blood?” was part of a big and complicated world and wasn’t so scary. These days no-one asks. They make statements. Wrong and hateful statements. This cuts the world down in size and turns it claustrophobic. I knew not to ask questions about the childhood of anyone who wore long sleeves in summer, because they were Shoah survivors: these days I’m told all sorts of strange things about my own life. I’m waiting for one of them to be true, and then I can crow like Peter Pan. I may be waiting a while. While I wait, though, I need to understand the stories people carry from their childhoods so that I can know where all this comes from.
I know what I did and what I was taught. I do not know the same about the next generation. They’re the ones leading the hate. I need to understand them better. And I am starting in a safe place for all of us… with what TV they watched.
I am open to suggestions of what other television I need to see. It would help me immensely if you explained when what you’re suggesting was on television and where it was on television. That way I can see patterns. Patterns are far better for understanding hate than shutting the world down and deleting bits of it.

More Eden

The day after tomorrow, I’ll be on my way home. I’ve been in Eden nearly a week and am used to it. I no longer hear the waves every minute, even though Calle Calle Bay is close by. I’m used to the lack of birdsong and the fact that there are so many dogs that barking is an ordinary part of the soundscape. Where I live, in Canberra, I’m woken up by magpies and kookaburras and there are so many other birds that sing, but I have to walk at least as far as the beach is from me right now to hear any dogs barking. I know how to pronounce most of the local names, and the one I had most wrong was Calle Calle (which is Caul Caul). I have talked to many locals and written many words. The biggest thing is that I have proven what I needed to prove: that one of the reasons I’m so il in Canberra is the climate there. I’m not suddenly well in Eden, but I am in far less pain and I can do more walking. In a half hour, in fact, I will be walking to the community market, which is about 1 km away. There and back will be all I can do in a day, but I can only walk that far in Canberra on really good day and here, there was only one day I could not.

I cannot afford to move down to the coast, but at least I know that if I save enough I can go to a seaside town once or twice a year and get writing done. I need more internet than I have access to here, however. I am saving all my writing for when I get home, when I will edit it and upload it and … things would have been a lot simpler if I could have finished all that here. The problem is only partly that wifi is spotty. It’s also my computer, which worked splendidly in Perth and doesn’t even connect enough in Eden to use the university’s online system of access to my word processing.

I could use my computer more readily in regional Germany than in regional Australia. I chat with locals about things like this and we swap the realisation that Sydney has far more of small everyday luxuries than places like Eden. Groceries are more expensive here, for instance, because Eden has the same distribution system that Canberra had when I first moved there, and so there are the storage and transport costs to Sydney to be factored into, say, the price of tomatoes. Even cheese is not cheap, which is ironic, because Eden is part of the shire of Bega and Bega is one of the most important cheese-making regions of Australia.

I was going to write you a romantic post about Eden the place, or an historical post about the whaling industry, or a post with pictures of gardens and I was going to ask you which was the real garden of Eden, but… I wanted to talk about the price of tomatoes. Maybe another time…

Small Lives in Winter

The title makes my life sound like an elegant painting. It is not, alas. It’s not nicely synchronised in colour, time, or any kind of harmony. In fact, this post is late because last night was midwinter being midwinter being midwinter. It was 4 degrees (39.2 for all those who prefer Fahrenheit) at 6 pm and I’m just warming up now. Me heater is on and I’ve moved from the night-time down dressing gown to the daytime oodie* and I will write this afternoon. I was supposed to run messages. A friend was going out and got the urgent things for me (paid in very fine chocolate and coffee) because today’s warmest was riddled with wind from the snow, which makes walking very difficult for those of us with arthritic joints. I can’t catch a bus because the nearest bus stop is too far away on days like this and I have been eating junk food. It’s one way of dealing. Not the most sensible, but it got me through last night and this morning. Tonight I’m back to being sensible. Between now and then, I must write some novel. This is my atonement for eating junk food. If I eat garbage I must produce good words, to keep the world in balance.

The novel is a vampire novel (of sorts) and my characters, too, will be eating junk food. What is junk food to a vampire/werewolf cross? I still have to work that out. I have ten minutes…

 

  • Spellcheck tells me I intended to write ‘foodie’. Given my recent eating habits, I fail at foodiedom and defy Spellcheck.

Is Turnabout Fair Play?

I have been playing around with the idea of writing a memoir about my colorful childhood for more than a decade, writing up brief, mostly comic episodes about bats and Christmas trees and the conversion of our family barn into House Beautiful. But I don’t seem to be able to find the connective tissue that would make those episodes into something cohesive. The problem, really, is that a lot of that connective tissue is pretty dark, and I haven’t been sure how to write that stuff. And that I am constantly aware of what I think of as the Rashomon factor.

Rashomon is a Japanese film from 1950 staring the brilliant Toshiro Mifune, in which the same story is told from four different perspectives. A samurai is found murdered in a forest; a priest, a bandit, the wife of the samurai, and the samurai himself (through a medium) tell their versions of the story, in none of which they are the villains. Every single event ever has many different versions. Especially in families. In writing a memoir you either have to be rock-solid in your conviction that your version is the true one, or ready to deal with the anger or anguish of family response.

There was a fascinating article in The New York Times on a new book by Molly Jong-Fast, about growing up as the daughter of writer Erica Jong. In the ’70s Erica Jong was sort of a literary “It” girl, the author of the novel Fear of Flying, and the creator of the phrase “zipless fuck.” Continue reading “Is Turnabout Fair Play?”

Deadlines

I have many files open on my computer today. By tomorrow night, if all goes well, most of them will be closed and in my past. I am, you see, in the final throes of the PhD. I submit my thesis on Thursday.

The thesis is around 75,000 words long and will, like most Australian PhDs, be examined as a written text. There is no oral component, just as there was no major field component. All the skills training and short courses I took, I took along the way, and part of the PhD (though not part of the 75,000 words) is to sum my training and presentations and new skills up. This is not part of the examination. It’s part of the paperwork that accompanies it. I have four forms to fill in today and two tomorrow. This, also, is part of the system.

This PhD is different to all other PhDs that I have done in one important way. I was quite ill the whole way through. I keep finding bits of my brain spattered on the page and then spend however-long-it-takes working out what stupidities I’ve said and how to fix them. Also, I am looking for corruption from the word processors and sharing a document over and over. The footnotes were a mess and are now sorted. That’s something. Most of my time today and tomorrow will be spent the same way as most of my time yesterday: working through the document, one sentence at a time, and making sure it makes sense.

What’s something else entirely is repeated text where the memory of an earlier version has crept through. I first encountered this corruption as a problem when I worked on much larger books when I was in the public service. It’s never a problem with short stories or novellas (for me, anyhow) but the moment something has more than, say, 20 drafts and is over about 60,000 words, I need to be aware and do a re-read. I have already copied and pasted to reduce the memory of umpteen versions in a single file, but that is no longer the magic cure it was with older word processors.

I never have this problem when I only work on something for six months, and when I don’t write as many drafts. Books are more easily written using the Mozart method, where everything is perfect from the very beginning, I suspect. I cannot write that way at all these days – illness intervenes.

In fact, I’ve never been able to write academic prose that way. Three supervisors scolded me when I wrote my very first PhD. One complained about wanting to turn the pages. The others merely said it was too readable and not scholarly enough. All the rewrites for that thesis were an attempt to make it, as I was instructed “Less discursive and less interesting.” I’m more scholarly these days, because I’m around forty years older and my brain is now officially turgid, but I still write fiction more easily than any of the academic disciplines I work in.

Each PhD is in a different discipline and each discipline has a different style. I like the referencing system for this one the best, but ethnohistory is so much easier for me to write than literary studies, for instance. My brain is not configured correctly for literary studies.

What happens on Thursday? I submit the thesis, a bunch of forms and reports and then I wait. The earliest I’m likely to hear about results is 10 weeks from submission. The longest I’ve ever had to wait for results was three years. Three years is not typical of Australian examinations! Most people know within three months. Those three years cost me my first career… no-one wants to employ someone who has no idea what the examiners think about their research.

What will I do with all the time I have after Thursday? I have a vampire novel that needs finishing. I am so tempted to add footnotes and a bibliography to it. Or maybe recipes. How many vampire novels contain recipes? I will ponder this important thought while I work through 75,000 words, gradually and gently.

 

PS Australia is still counting votes. This is the most interesting election in years, and I wish I had time to talk about it. My electorate still doesn’t have a final result.

Moving Parts

Publishing is a lot.

As a friend noted about her own book series, New York Publishing and I had kind of a breakup. Nobody’s fault: we just grew apart. Which is to say that after the publication of Petty Treason, the second of my Sarah Tolerance mysteries, my NY publisher decided not to pick up the third book. Write an historical, they suggested. So I did; Sold for Endless Rue. But I also finished the third book, The Sleeping Partner, which was published by Plus One Press. By that time I had a full time job, a kid who was having Hell’s own case of adolescence, and a sense of depression about my publishing prospects. I really wanted all my Sarah Tolerance books under one roof, as it were–and a roof that would not try to market them as romances (which they are not).

Time goes by. Much water under bridge. Lose one job, get another very absorbing one. Also get absorbed in work with the Book View Cafe writers coop. Child survives adolescence. I leave my involvement in Book View Cafe (again: nobody’s fault; we grew apart). Somehow manage to write a fourth book in the Sarah Tolerance series, and have ideas for a fifth and final book. And finally I retire, look around me, and realize that if I want these books done the way I want them done, I have to take on the lion’s share of publishing them.

At which point I considered hiding under the bed.

When I sold my first book there was no such thing as the internet, let alone social media. The idea was: you wrote a book. If a publisher liked it and bought it, you had some housekeeping things to do (revisions as requested, and reviewing the galleys, and if someone from the publicity office arranged an interview, you did that, too). But overall the job of the writer was to write the book, then write another book, etc., world without end. Well, times change, the internet and social media happen, and even if you have a NY publisher that’s not the way it works now.

In the 1990s I worked for a NY publisher. I am fully alive to the number of things that a publisher does. Acquiring books is only the tip of a significant iceberg. The editorial department does the acquiring, but also helps the author beat the book into publishable shape–which includes developmental editing, line editing, copy editing, and proof-reading. Editorial also helps get the marketing department going by writing (or causing to be written) sales copy, cover copy, and sales catalog materials. Production works on getting the book into physical shape–including working with Editorial on hiring and directing a designer for the cover. But also: getting the book interior designed and typeset and to the printer. Meanwhile, Marketing and Sales are getting the word out, both to the general public (via advertisements and reviews etc.) but to distributors and sellers.

It is a lot. Publishers have many people with skills and experience to do these things. I have… me. And anyone I can hire to take on some of the things I cannot do (it is a very good thing to know what your skill set is and what you cannot reliably do).

I’m not bad at some of the tasks small-press or self-publishing require: I can edit, proof-read and even copy-edit (although that’s generally something I do for other people). I can write cover copy and do cover design (although again, it’s easier when it’s not for my own work). What I find it tremendously difficult to do is the marketing/promotion side of the publishing process. And that is the stuff that many writers do for themselves: drumming up blurbs. Publishing and managing a newsletter. Fan management (a friend last week kept referring to “super fans,” and while I know such entities exist, I have a difficult time believing such people exist with regard to my work).

Take newsletters. I have a newsletter setup to go out Very Soon Now. I intend for it to be quarterly, because honestly I don’t think there’s that much news about my work even when there is news about my work. But there are people who send out newsletters monthly, weekly, even… daily. As one of my own daily chores is to clean out the Augean stable that is my inbox, I can’t imagine anyone would welcome that much contact. Perhaps the mystery inherent in a quarterly newsletter is a good thing?

Or Patreons. I admire the energy that many of my friends put into them, but when I start looking at what is required in terms of upkeep and production–not production of a book or short story, but special bonuses for the kind people who are enthusiastic enough about one’s work to support it… Again, I consider hiding under the bed.

Every writer I know has their own way of approaching promotion. I’m doing the newsletter. I’m not doing a Patreon. Or a kickstarter, at least not right now. The best use of my time is, I earnestly believe, writing. If I want my writing to be seen, I am willing to do some of the other stuff. Just not all of it. And I’m not above considering going back to traditional publishing when I complete the non-Sarah Tolerance book I’ve been noodling on. But that won’t happen until I get the Tolerances out the door.

Dissertating

I’ve finished a complete draft (a clean one) of my dissertation. Around 75,000 words, so about the size of a standard non-fiction study. While there are more processes to get through to reach that draft: annual reports, forms to fill, supervisors to meet and talk to, the actual work involved is the same as for most scholarly work if you already know enough about the subject. This is why the US has additional processes to check that the student has that knowledge. Australia doesn’t have Major Field exams and has limited coursework. It took me about five weeks all up to finish my coursework, in fact. We have to understand ethics for research, and how to work safely, and any languages for the research, and how to actually do the research, and the norms for the field we’re working in, and so forth and so on and… lots of small things, but, in my case, the only big one was learning about literary studies. I’d already done a lot of research in other disciplines and I already read all the languages, so my coursework was basically a matter of going through online modules and demonstrating I had the knowledge.

One entirely odd facet of doing three PhDs is the language side of things. For my first PhD I needed to read nine languages well. I couldn’t read all of those languages well enough (especially Latin, which I could not read at all) so I took a year off in the middle and did a Masters in Canada. That coursework taught me why the US and Canadian PhDs, with the hefty coursework load, are so very handy. It also taught me that my undergraduate degree was very rigorous, which is why I had most of what I needed before I began. I added Latin and palaeography to my skills in Canada and they are very useful!

For my second PhD I only needed five languages, and they were all ones I already knew. I’ve talked to so many fiction writers about this, and most of them did not need any languages except English. “How did you deal with archives and primary sources?” I asked. Some of them don’t. Others pay to have critical works translated or work with translations. Our minds were entirely boggled by each others’ approaches.

This led me to a new understanding. PhD theses (including exegeses attached to Creative Arts PhDs, which is what my second was) are each unique. Underlying skills are similar: research for original work (which is exceedingly different to the type of research I do to write a short story or a novel without a scholarly bent), the capacity to write, the capacity to edit, and an extreme level of patience with the processes of study and publishing.

I said that I’ve finished the thing, but I still have much administratrivia to do, and the copy edit to go through. My thesis will be submitted on 15 May, and it will be months before I know the result.

The need for patience is very familiar to me from my novels. Someones I wait months after the final edits are done for a novel to be published and sometimes years. COVID and the current economic crises have both elongated my wait times (and me being Jewish doesn’t help with some parts of the industry and makes no difference at all to others): I have two novels queued and do not know when they will emerge. My first PhD was beset by quite different crises, but with the same result. The examination took three years, which pretty much cost me my career, back then.

This (almost finished) PhD is different in one big way. The discipline I’m working in is the first I am not entirely comfortable with. I am far more an historian than a literary scholar. Working in Literary Studies has given me a solid appreciation of the work of literary experts. History is not easier, but it suits the way my mind works. I like assembling data and making beautiful patterns from it and explaining it to the world. Now that I understand that not all research does this and that it’s a good thing that there are different approaches (truly, I understand story far, far better now that I can see it from more than one discipline – it’s going to affect both my writing and my teaching, in good ways) my current work of non-fiction is suddenly a lot easier. I don’t have to read every bit of research written in the last 250 years in eleven languages to explain what needs to be explained. It still helps I have the languages, to be honest, but it also helps that I now look for who I’m talking to early on and that I pay far more attention to audience than I used to.

What does this add up to? First, even though I think of it as a dissertation, my PhD is a book. Now that I’m almost done with it, I can finish the book I began during my PhD intermission last year (that trip to Germany was for a purpose).

Two books in a year? Not quite. My earlier work is coming back to haunt me and I may have a third book, which is short essays and thus only needs editing. If this happens (and right now it looks likely) it’s a different type of book again, with quite different research. Short essays don’t need the deep and long research. They take somewhere between an hour (if I already know the subject and have the book I’m writing about in front of me) to about three days. The book adds up, over time, to about 8 months’ work, not three to four years.

Why do I calculate these things? I’m ill (and finally being a bit more open about it) and can’t do all the things I used to do. And yet I’m writing more than I ever have. Short stories (when someone asks) and novels and non-fiction. All these doctorates have helped me understand how much work I need to put in for my various types of writing.

Way back when I was a professional reviewer (a long, long time ago) one of the biggest issues I found with many works, was that balance between the right amount of research, taking the right direction for the research, and keeping in mind that the reader will have the book in front of them. All books need to be readable for their audiences. Those writers who hit this successfully every single time (and you can see some of these simply by looking at the work of other Treehouse writers – I share the Treehouse with amazing writers) can be trusted by their audience. You can pick up a book by them and know it will do what it is supposed to do and that you will be entertained, and often be made to think, and be delighted.

My writing is too diverse for this. For example, I’m untrustworthy for entertainment because my first PhD was so very not entertaining. It wasn’t supposed to be. In fact, I was in huge trouble for the first two years because, as my main supervisor said, “The reader is not supposed to want to turn the page.” This is why most theses are unpublishable as they are and why I didn’t even seek to get that first one published: I had to drain all the joy out to get it through examination.

I’ve learned a great deal over the years, and I managed to be properly scholarly without as much desiccation in the new thesis. It still can’t be published without significant changes. A dissertation is quite different to a book for the wider public because its audience is entirely different.

I still don’t believe anyone needs three PhDs, even if I end up with three myself… but I am in love with the amount of learning along the way. Knowing the difference between writing for academics, for teachers, for the general public and for myself: not a bad outcome. Knowing when to stop researching and why to stop researching for about ten different types of books: what every writer needs.

Let me finish the last unfinished thought and then I’ll get back to work. What is that thought? I used nine languages for the first PhD, didn’t I? It was a Medieval History book, and I read over 139 primary sources (Old French epic legends, Middle English Arthuriana, Latin chronicles and the like), and I had to have both the medieval language and the modern language and… it was so much fun. For years I was the world expert in Old French insults: I still teach how to use them effectively in fighting scenes.

Remember it was five languages for the second PhD, which was a time travel novel and a dissertation? I should have learned an extra language, but I discovered that Old Occitan was easy to read when one knows Latin and various dialects of Old French. I have the manual for it. I read through it once and realised that was enough to read most texts in Old Occitan. A friend once called this “the Medievalist advantage.” I try to say everything in the paragraph pompously because, honestly it sounds pompous.

The only languages I needed for the current PhD were English and French and maybe a little Spanish. That’s all. I learned the disciple, not extra languages.

There have to be PhDs where one only needs one language, but I’ve not undertaken any. Why? There’s a reason for the languages. They open up concepts and give exciting new insights. There is very little research that’s not better with knowledge of more languages. Think about it. Isn’t my life better because I can be rude to idiots in Old French?

The changes in the US are reaching out over the world. Added to the increase in antisemitism and many more people are looking through a red veil and seeing hate or despite when the reality is we’re not communicating clearly. Whether I’m right or wrong or entirely evil in whatever I say, I feel like a mouse with cats both visible and invisible, just waiting to pounce. Some of my friends have gone quiet, which is sensible. I am sometimes not so quiet and a random cat pounces. The cat might be pouncing because I’m vermin or because they’re hyper-aware and see me as vermin, but either way…. they pounce.

And I need to think of nicer things. Not the cyclone. It was not, as cyclones go, a very big one. In fact, it was hardly a cyclone at all. The parts of SE Queensland and NE NSW it hit, though, included much flat land that was easily saturated with water. People talk about the hills of Brisbane, and yes, they are pretty. But Brisbane airport is 3m above sea level and it’s not the only part that’s so close to sea level. When there’s too much rain, the land becomes saturated quickly and Brisbane floods and the floods do not roll down the mountains to the sea… because a large part of the city has low elevation. On the Gold Coast, there is very little beach left, but beach can be restored. So far, all my friends and family in that region are fine, which is something.

You need some good news, right?

The first bit of good news has to do with water… from the opposite end to floods. There is a new book (ebook right now, and I’ll make a formal announcement when the paperback comes out) that talks about water and that intends to raise money to help people in very dry areas (Sahel-dry) manage water. I have an alternate history sarcastic little piece in it. You can find the ebook here:  Yemoja’s Tears

The second bit of good news is that later this week is Purim (the feast of Esther) and it’s obligatory for me to get drunk. This year I think I need it.

On Keeping The Rules in Fiction

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. Continue reading “On Keeping The Rules in Fiction”