This Saturday, 8th October, the RNA is running a day for readers who love Regency fiction and history. Appropriately it is in St James’s (nearest underground Green Park). and I’ve helped to organise it. It’s going to be a blast.

What has really impressed me is how much historical research and sheer attention to detail modern-day authors put into their Regency-set novels. In which, of course, they follow the example of the amazing Georgette Heyer, an author of commercial fiction still selling 90 years after her first book was published.  I am really looking forward to hearing Dr Jennifer Kloester at the Regency day.  Her new biography of Heyer hits the bookshops this week. 

Prize-winning author Louise Allen, who will also be there, has put together a slideshow of some of her collection of contemporary prints.  I have posted a few below, which illustrate beautifully some of the activities and subjects on offer on Saturday.

Costume

Carriage dress 1815

Walks

St James's

Sex and Scandal

Reply to a Letter

News of Waterloo Arrives in London

Waterloo after the Battle

An especial treat is that some of us will actually be taking tea in the room where the Prince Regent received Wellington’s Despatch on Midsummer Night 1815.  It was a dramatic scene and we have readings of contemporary accounts.

And, of course, all through the day we will keep coming back to Jane Austen, that minute observer of her society, and Georgette Heyer, whose novels are so well researched, that generations of readers have absorbed history from them without noticing.    

For lovers of fun, fiction and history, this is going to be a one-off.  Booking here . Or contact me direct  It’s going to be a day to remember!

First US Edition

Bewilderment was limned upon the girl’s fair face.  “I don’t understand.  What do you want me to specially look at?”

“At what do you want me specially to look,” corrected Hamilton Beamish mechanically.  He drew her across the roof. “You see that summer-house thing?  It is George Finch’s open-air sleeping porch.  Go in, shut the door, switch on the light . . .”

“But . . .”

“. . . and remove a portion of your clothes.”

“What!”

“And if anybody comes, tell him that George Finch rented you the apartment and that you are dressing to go out to dinner.  I, meanwhile, will go down to my apartment and will come up in a few minutes to see if you are ready to be taken out to dine.”  Pardonable pride so overcame Hamilton Beamish that he discarded the English Pure and relapsed into the argot of the proletariat.  “Is that a cracker-jack?”  he demanded with gleaming eyes.  “Is that a wam?  Am I the bozo with the big bean or am I not?”

The girl eyed him worshippingly.  One of the consolations we men of intellect have is that, when things come to a crisis, what captures the female heart is brains. Women may permit themselves in times of peace to stray after Sheiks and look languishingly at lizards whose only claim to admiration is that they can do the first three steps of the Charleston:  but let matters go wrong; let some sudden peril threaten; and who then is the king pippin, who the main squeeze?  The man with the eight and a quarter hat.

“Jimmy,” she cried, “it’s the goods”.

There are many excuses for an author to procrastinate. Fear, hunger, bills-to-pay, fear, leaking rooves, accounts, committee reports . . .  Did I mention fear? But today has given me one of the weirdest.

German readers, blessings on them, like TO MARRY A PRINCE. They like it so much, indeed, that they have brought out an additional edition under the BestBook imprint.  My copy arrived this morning. And after the glee, the preening, stroking the cover and recklessly toasting its success in Earl Grey tea, I looked a bit harder at that cover.

And got out the first edition.

And … and …

OK, the second book is a bit fatter, a bit more solid in every dimenson.  But the cover is the same regal violet blue as the original German (and indeed UK) paperback. It still shows a huge wedding dress with the bride’s head out of frame.  But — but — 

Do you remember those cartoons where you were supposed to find 10 things which were different between version 1 and version 2? I think the Germans invented them.

So here they are.  Judge for yourself; well, the best you can within the limitations of my scanner.  (The skirt of the first one has applique white roses; the second one is decorated with swags of diamonds and pearls; but you have to look hard to see both.  All right, I looked hard. Authors procrastinate – right?)  

How many differences can you see? I’ve got 8 so far. 

And, apart from distracting me from my work in progess, why?

German Paperback 1

German Paperback 2

Recently, I was raving to a friend about some music and he said, ‘If you like something that much, you should tell the world. That’s what the Internet is for, isn’t it?’  

Pausing only to repress the suspicion that the sub-text was go and witter at somebody else, I decided that it was a good wheeze.  So here goes with my first enthusement.

This is a gem of a book.  Also completely unexpected.  From the Cartland pink cover, I thought I was getting butterfly-thin romance with a side order of gorgeous frocks. The frocks are there all right, important, nay critical. And so is the romance. But forget butterflies; this book is warm, humane and very grounded.   

Vicky, our heroine, is a teenager from a traveller family. In a classic small community (hugely affectionate, nosy and judgemental) she struggles hard to be a good girl, to please everyone who loves her, yet ultimately to be true to herself. She is a kind girl, hard working, generous and a loyal friend, but she has a lot to learn and much of it is painful. And her family don’t help – when do they ever?  Especially when, as we all must, she has a brief sortie into bad girl territory.

I’m not giving any more of the plot away but I will say that everyone, not just Vicky, learns something from her trials– and that includes the gorgeous Love of her Life. And the book has a genuinely happy ending.

It’s a long time since I was sixteen, but Kate Lace had me tearing up, remembering the wild uncertainties of the mid teens – swinging between everything is possible to nothing can be done; certain that the world was run by other people and I didn’t get a vote.  This is I Capture the Castle country. Vicky’s family are not as barking as the Mortmains but the not-to-be-questioned patriarch could certainly give that genius writer a run for his money. And Vicky, like Cassandra, is the one brave, tremulous bridge between Mad Family and a normal, everyday world. Your heart goes out to her. 

This is a lovely book, perfect beach read, with a bittersweet charm that lingers. Definitely a keeper.

Happy Publication Day, Kate

DECLARATION OF INTEREST 

I think it’s only fair to come clean and say that KL is a mate 1st class (We do sleep-overs and borrow books from each other, so the real McCoy.) But I genuinely loved the book and I would have written this anyway, even had I never shared a bottle of fizz with her.

Q      What do Ulysses, Clarissa and Harry Potter have in common?

A      People don’t pinch ’em. Well, not from my book shelves.

My theory is that, in Harry Potter’s case, anyone who wants him has already got him. As for the other two– well, frankly, they don’t want ’em.  They’re not books you read

     a) starting at the beginning and going straight on until you get to the end

and/or

     b) for pleasure. 

Actually, Ulysses was the biggest disappointment of my reading life so far when I first read it, aged about 12. I adored The Odyssey. A trusted teacher told me that Ulysses was exciting. Um– childish men and contorted prose didn’t do it for me at that age. I even said so, which in retrospect I’m quite proud of, though I wasn’t at the time. I hadn’t been called a Philistine before. 

Q      Which books do people pinch?

A      Ones they might just start a love affair with.       

You know the feeling– the glance across a crowded room, the hair rising on the back of the neck, the goblin Imagination sitting up in its bat-cave, rubbing it eyes and saying, ‘All right….’ 

I always think of that moment as the recognition of starlight– suddenly you’re on your own in a solar wind: you might fly, you might freeze; you might just wake up in a fluster in your own bed, feeling a bit of a fool.

Actually, I have a theory that the really vitriolic reviews of novels which you sometimes find on the Internet are written by people who feel dumped by a book they’ve nearly fallen in love with. No fury like a disappointed lover.

Q    Name names

A    Too many to list.

I’ve done a lot of re-purchasing over the years. Mary Stewart’s Nine Coaches Waiting is probably the champion pinchee. I’ve had at least five covers on that one, and I don’t count the current chick-litty one, because I’ll give that away as soon as I can get another copy; nobody’s going to have to pinch it.  

A starter list of other titles which have proved too strong a temptation for my guests: Blandings Castle and Elsewhere by P G Wodehouse;  Middlemarch by George Eliot;  Thyme Out by Katie Fforde – actually, no Katie Fforde is safe but for some reason Thyme Out seems to be a particular favourite with bookthieves;  Sylvester by Georgette Heyer;  The Cement Garden by Ian McEwen. (Interestingly, The Boys’ Club only get pinched in their earlier incarnations; Metroland goes a lot, too. Saturday and Arthur and George have stuck like an aunt after Christmas.) Kafka’s Metamorphosis and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.        

Q     Has it ever happened to any of your own books? 

A     Ah . . .

Up to now I’d never thought so. Largely, I suppose, because when people come to stay with me, I don’t press my own effusions on them. They take books away with them because they start reading something from one of the shelves in the spare room, where they sleep, or the bathroom, where they hibernate, or even (occasionally) the sitting room, though that’s where I keep the big stuff I’ve had for ever and love a lot. Generally, I manage to head them off at the pass in there. Besides, who’s going to go staggering out of the house with a Folio Edition of The Tale of Genji tucked inside their hoodie?  Modern clothing doesn’t have the load-bearing capacity.  

My own books are kept in the study, where I don’t usually encourage visitors. So guests don’t get their hands on them unless they ask. Mostly they don’t. 

However,  there are a few early indications that To Marry A Prince  MIGHT just have started edging me towards this august Company of The Pinch-Worthy.  There have been rumours on Twitter and telephone chats of families tussling over it. But Twitter is ephemeral and oral accounts are so easy to misinterpret. I like good, solid written evidence. So I beamed from ear to ear last week when a respectable citizen wrote to me, ‘My 12 year old grand-daughter quickly seized my copy and avidly got going with it. I managed to get it back and read it myself on my way out to Bordeaux last week.’  He did get it back, of course, which strictly falls outside the statistical definition, I suppose. But still . . .

Dance little book! You might be on the way to becoming Pinchable.

Over a year ago I was invited to speak to the Barnes Literary Society on Heroes We Love.  A couple of days ago, the date came round. Unfortunately Chairman Fiona Smith, who had chosen the title, was ahead of the zeitgeist curve.  In the ten days before my scheduled talk there was Sebastian Faulks all over the BBC like a badly made suit talking about 1) The Hero and 2) the Lover.

I tried to convince myself that it didn’t matter.  I could just go ahead and talk about gorgeous heroes of romantic fiction, as I had prepared. Couldn’t I?

Well, no. This was the sort of audience that would have watched the Faulks programme. I had to deal with his arguments, unless I was prepared to let the Faulksian view of Heroes and Lovers go unchalllenged.  I wasn’t.

Besides there was also an excellent programme on BBC 4 by Henry Hutchings about the 18th Century novel and that was the start of the English romantic novel as we know it today, so I needed to cover that, too.  So I spat on my hands and prepared a new talk.

It went fine.  I think.

Until the Questions. Would I accept that the Odyssey was the first romantic novel? Um– Circe? Nausicaa? No, my interlocutor was thinking about the  reunion of Penelope and Odysseus. I had a vague memory but it wasn’t enough for a decent answer. And then, someone else asked why did I say Henry Fielding ‘only’ went to Leiden University? Well, he didn’t take a degree and was only there a year or so, I said blithely. It hadn’t been part of my immediate research but I remembered that, didn’t I? 

Or did I?

It niggled away, all that evening. Returned in my dreams. The next morning, I couldn’t resist. I had to know if, off the top of my head, I’d been talking twaddle.  If I had, I needed to apologise and put it right.  So I ferreted about my bookshelves, Google searched books I didn’t have, and discovered a fascinating story.

Yes, Fielding went to Leiden, to read law. He arrived late in the term, on March 16 1728.  His play Love in Several Masques had a delayed first night at Drury Lane and he had stayed in London to see it.  Well, who wouldn’t? He came back to England in the summer, when he wrote a couple of pieces for journals. Then he returned to Leiden in February 1729, renting a room in the house of one Jan Oson.  By April 1729 Fielding had left Leiden for good, and his Italian tutor had seized his possessions at Oson’s house in settlement of his debts.

Of course, the sensible person would have stopped there. I hadn’t got it wrong. I was off the hook.

But now I had started, I wanted to know why? Why Leiden? Why the Law, instead of Classics? Why the debts?

It”s a very modern story in one way. Henry Fielding’s  mother died when he was a boy. In 1720 his father, Edmund, sold part of his wife’s property and invested in South Sea Stocks. That bubble, of course, burst.  It looks as if Edmund was a gambler at games of chance, too. In 1721 Henry’s maternal grandmother, Lady Gould, sued Edmund, charging him with dissipating the children’s inheritance and with trying to convert them to Catholicism, the faith of Edmund’s second wife, Anna Rapha. In 1722, the case was heard in Chancery, and it was decided that Henry would continue at Eton and spend holidays with Lady Gould. His three sisters and younger brother also went to live with her, as far as I can see.

In 1724, aged 18, Henry leaves Eton.  In theory he has an allowance but it doesn’t look as if much money materialises. He tells his friends that ‘any body might pay it if they would’.  In 1725 he tries to elope with a rich merchant’s daughter in Lyme Regis (for love? for money?) but her family get her back . He then goes to London permanently where he tries to earn a living by writing plays and occasional journalism. Lady Mary Wortley Montague, 18 years older than he is, takes an interest in him at this stage and records that he told her that he was so poor he had to choose between being a hackney coachman or a hackney writer. 

(So does that mean Henry Fielding was the first person to call a writer a hack? No, be strong, Haddon. You have no time to go ferreting round after that as well!)

He’s living hand to mouth, then. Clearly he ought to finish his education and find a way to earn a more reliable living. One of his best friends from Eton, George Lyttleton, has gone up to Oxford (Christ Church) to read law and may have given him the idea. Tom Jones, published in 1749 was to be dedicated to George, who had a very decent career as Secretary to the Prince of Wales and Commissioner to the Treasury; he even became Lord Chancellor in 1755. But I do hope the dedication was based on that old friendship as well as hope of patronage. 

So why Leiden?  There is some suggestion that Leiden was then cheaper than Oxford or Cambridge but it was also a great centre of classical scholarship and had a reputation as a centre for free thinking. I can imagine both of those attracting Fielding, liberal in sympathy and a reformer by temperament, as we see both in his novels and  his work as a magistrate. 

But the truth is that Fielding was a born writer. Horace Walpole has a story that, once, Fielding went back to school after the holidays, with his lesson assignments untouched but having written a comedy instead ‘in which he had drawn the character of his father and family’.  Even if he could have afforded to stay at Leiden, would he have done so?  When his second comedy, The Temple Beau, was produced at the theatre in Goodman’s Fields in January 1730?  Can’t see it myself. 

But when Fielding writes of Tom Jones’s scrabbing for a foothold when he reaches London, I now suddenly see the twenty year old Henry, not knowing where his next penny is coming from.  

So was it wasted, that day’s nerdish digging?

Now for The Odyssey . . .

Some time ago, a chap called Dr Cliff Arnall calculated the third Monday in January to be the unhappiest day of the year.  He based it on the fact that this was when the weather was foul, the credit card bills for Christmas had started to come in and you had realised that you weren’t going to keep your New Year Resolutions. Plus the euphoria of Christmas had worn off. Oh, and Monday’s always grim, anyway, because you have to go back to work after your fabulous weekend, don’t you? Newspapers love the story; there’s a nicely balanced piece about it in Wikipedia.  (Happy 10th Birthday, Wikipedia, by the way.) 

Well, of course, I don’t know what is going to happen today. It could be a killer. But, as of 08.00 hours, blue I’m not.

Braced for a household marathon, yes.  Squaring up to filing all the stuff that has currently turned the study floor into a compost heap, certainly. (Hope there’s nothing alive in there.) Blue? No.

Because I cancelled Christmas, nuked New Year, banished my birthday and wrote up a storm instead, inspired by yet another reason to be cheerful, the royal engagement. Today I wish the world well, in every part. 

For Random House, bless their pointy little heads, have sent me a copy of the cover of MY NEW BOOK. Calloo callay, my cup runneth over. Here it is.

published 31st March 2011

So if you’re feeling blue Mondayish, remember nice things do happen: nice young couples get engaged and loopy authors finish a book. And spring is coming.

When I last blogged, it was the jewelled end of autumn. I was talking about shadow figures who beckon the writer down elven paths. I was quite certain that my next book would come from following one of those paths.

Huh!

Sometimes the imagination wanders. Sometimes it gets sandbagged from behind.

Here I am two months later, with a completely new book imagined, written, sold and edited. It went to copy-editing this week. It even has a cover.

When I last blogged, it wasn’t even on my list of about 30 (32 actually, I’ve just filed them and I counted) ideas that I can’t bear to leave alone and keep coming back to. 

So what started it off? Elven path? Macchiavelli in the mist?

Nah.

Reuters and allied trades. Plus Publishers’ Prodding. (God bless the Publisher.)

So, here I am, blinking in the light, considering New Year’s resolutions and how did the pile of ironing get so big?

Phew!

The leaves are falling off the leaves in torrents now. Go for a walk and they are wind-driven into piles of gold and scarlet and ruby and cinnamon brown.  They look as if some Florentine tailor has just dropped his pack of velvets and is running for his life.

When I was small, this was the time of year when the elves’ paths in the woods were suddenly revealed.  Where there had been a dense wall of foliage in summer, suddenly there were overgrown, narrow tracks, barely wide enough for an adult human to squeeze through, spiking off from the main path. They led through twiggy undergrowth, round tree trunks, over streams, off into …. where? 

The unknown.  The place where your imagination has to sniff the air and fall back on its own devices. The Path of Scary Possibilities. 

You can see bits of the path, but not all of it. You don’t know how the bits you can see fit together. You certainly can’t see where the path ends. In order to find out, you will have to bend double, and risk a scratching from twigs, being tripped up by hidden tree roots and having to ford your way through streams and mud and maybe tumble down sudden slopes ….  You don’t know whether you will be able to get back.   But something went this way. Can you go too?

The best writing, the most exciting reading (and watching movies, going to the theatre, hearing opera) are the same.  And sometimes– be still my beating heart– among the shadows appears an enigmatic figure who may lead you somewhere magical.  

For the late great Eva Ibbotson, I’m willing to lay down good money that one of these thrilling, compulsive, enigmatic shadow-heroes was Raskolnikov. For Phillipa Ashley he is actor, Richard Armitage.

In real life, Armitage appears to be a nice bloke who does a bit of DIY and is bewildered by the excesses of fans. In a televised North and South, he was a rude, truth-telling mill owner.  In a rubbish Robin Hood, he was a leather-clad sadist who made the Merrie Men of Sherwood F. look like the Much Piddling in the Marsh Under Eighteen Glee Club. Currently–  possibly for one more week only–  he is Lucas North in  the BBC series Spooks–  half Mephistopheles, half Scarlet Pimpernel.   

Spooks is one of those programmes where they do Tension by the bucketful. To my shame, I find there is a constant possibility of retreating behind the sofa to cower. Every time it’s on, I say to myself, ‘Can I bear to watch this week?’ Sometimes, I can’t. 

And this series the writers (brilliant or what?) have upped the ante by making Lucas North by turns good guy, bad guy, good guy, bad- oh no-o-o-o-o-o really-evil-guy. 

And, by golly, Mr Armitage has pulled out the stops for them.  I’m an impatient TV-watcher. By now, I would have expected to say, ‘Sod it, I can’t keep up. I can’t be bothered with this.’ Mr Armitage keeps me bothered, keeps me hoping-against-hope.  Keeps me, in fact, walking down that mysterious path to who-knows-where  with all my antennae on full alert.

Makes me feel alive, in other words. 

How?

The point about Mr Armitage, it seems to me, is he is serious. Alison Pearson thinks it’s because he’s a grown-up, and there is much in what she says.

But I think it’s more than that. He plays his characters with a sort of options-closed-off intensity that drags you in, too.  Even if you’re a congenital hedger of bets, even if you’re the sort of person that uses comparison websites, makes reasoned judgements, doesn’t get too involved with messy emotions or irrational desires.  Yes, even you will still have a bit of your imagination that knows those elven paths are there.  Dangerous, untrustworthy, challenging  as they are, they might just take you to a Different You.

And one of Mr Armitage’s characters might just point the way. After all, he turned Phillipa Ashley into a successful romantic novelist.

I am so very sad to see from the Observer’s obit column on Sunday that Eva Ibbotson has died. She drew obits from The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and the New York Times, quite rightly.  All focused on her work as an accomplished children’s author. But they were sadly light on appreciation of her romantic novels for adults.

She did, of course, win the Romantic Novel of the Year with Magic Flutes in 1983, as the Telegraph noted. Um – recently re-issued, it has been given a new title,  Reluctant Heiress, presumably by some pale eyed genius with a degree in Applied Bum-Numbing and no truck with allusion, ambiguity or intriguing the reader. Ibbotson was not impressed. She didn’t much like the new covers, either, which is why I have scanned in my own much loved, much read and just a tiny bit battered copy of my fabourite Ibbotson, below.

But she did more than win the UK’s main award for Romantic Fiction. She brought a fresh, idiosyncratic and deeply humane voice to romantic fiction. She was, you felt, a writer who knew what a happy ending was for. 

Last year Anne Gracie (friend of mine and most excellent writer) interviewed Ibbotson on the always rewarding  Word Wenches Blog. In her answers, Ibbotson said she thought of her books as presents for the reader and ‘not too much about my soul and the sunset’.  She certainly gave her readers every last  drop of satisfaction from the romantic entangling of her delicious, generous, healing heroines and her troubled heroes.

In the matter of heroes, even an enthusiast for romantic fiction like me has to admit that, sometimes, the modern author can short change him. He may end up not much more than an idealised loved object, dimly perceived through a fog of lust, sentiment and fag smoke. Not in Ibbotson’s novels.  She knew her hero and she loved him, quite as much as she loved her heroine. Usually, he is not intrinsically glamorous; indeed there is a dash of nerd in most. Even my beloved Quinn in Morning Gift, has more than a hint of Gussie Fink Nottle about him. But when he applies that intensity, that seriousness, to the objective of his heart as well as to scholarship, he is breathtaking–  especially as he struggles between what he wants, what he thinks the heroine wants and what it would be the right thing to do.

Ibbotson told Anne Gracie: ‘The kind of dichotomy between honour and passion is as old as the hills and I must say getting my heroes out of their dilemmas has sometimes not been easy.’  She always did but they travel a hard road before they get their reward.

Also, she loved her minor characters. As she told Gracie ‘the word minor hardly fits.’

I never forget the truly terrible scene from Countess Below Stairs, in which the washed-up and slightly disreputable Great Uncle is banished to his own rooms by an in-coming Eugenecist bride. After the heir’s marriage, Uncle will be condemned to stay upstairs, away even from the servants, who have known and cared for him all his life. He will be effectively a prisoner, with a nurse-jailer to ensure his good behaviour.  Our heroine by now is breaking her heart for a man she cannot have.  But she hauls herself out of her own misery, knowing that the humiliated old man can only be led back to some sort of peace through his music.  So she persuades him to play a piano duet with her.  Her hands are chapped and she’s out of practice.  (She’s now employed as a housemaid.)  His fingering has been ruined by rheumatism.  So they sit down and play – and they do it, Ibbotson says, ‘Not well. Better than that.’

No, the word minor does not fit.

My own favourite of her novels is The Morning Gift, with its unlikely St George of a hero and its gloriously logical and slighty loopy heroine. Viennese Ruth, another refugee, not wholly in tune with Belsize Park or the stolid English, works everything out from first principles. As a result, she often gets them crashingly wrong. (By the way, for writers, this book  contains a love scene so perfect that one despairs of ever writing one comparable, it is so heartfelt, so truthful, so sexy, with just the right spice of surprise and the faintly ludicrous.)  But Madensky Square is perhaps more emotionally profound; A Company of Swans  more magical; Countess both funnier and more of a fairytale. In all of them, though, Ibbotson has fantastic villains–  smug, narrow minded people who throw their weight about because they can. You do not see for ages how decent people can possibly stand out against them. And then Ibbotson gives you the wonderful present of their come-uppance. They are trounced, usually by a divine alliance of the hero, the heroine and those life-enhancing not-minor characters.

But nothing I can say is as good as what Eva Ibbotson wrote herself. In that interview, Gracie also gave a link to a piece Ibbotson had written herself about what public libraries meant to the dispossessed refugees from Hitler’s Germany in 1930s Belsize Park. It was published in The Observer on July 9th 2006 and anyone who, like me, adores Morning Gift, will find familiar faces there.  I’d quote from it but I don’t want to spoil it for you. It’s like a short story and it’s wonderful.

Please, please, please, read it here and see what a writer we have lost. But also enjoy!