YOUR SCANDALOUS WAYS: The Interview Part Uno

An Interview with Loretta Chase
by Susan/Miranda
At last, at last! The book so many of us have been waiting for this spring is finally in stores NOW. Your Scandalous Ways by Wench Loretta Chase is already gathering a heady share of well-deserved praise, and there are plenty of people (myself included) who think it's Loretta's best since Lord of Scoundrels. To help get readers in the proper mood, Loretta reveals the Truth behind this extraordinary book -- or at least the Truth about James, Francesca, the influence of Venice, and all those plaster putti.
If you'd like to hear Loretta discuss this book via video (think along the exciting lines of "Garbo Speaks!"), please check out her new YouTube clips. And please be sure to join us for Part Two of the interview of Friday.
Also: Loretta will be giving away a signed copy of Your Scandalous Ways to a reader who posts on either half of the interview. Ask your questions now!
Susan/Miranda: Many of your previous books have been interconnected, but Your Scandalous Ways introduces a whole new set of characters to readers. What inspired you to create James and Francesca?
Loretta: Casino Royale was the spark. It made me think, “What about a 007 in the early 19th Century? I didn’t see Daniel Craig, though. I saw tall, dark, and handsome. And for some reason, I saw half-Italian. Once James Cordier took form, Francesca came instantly to life. The exotic looks--the elongated eyes, the wide mouth--came from a model in Brooks Brothers ads. The movie got Venice on my mind, too. I studied it, then Byron’s letters from his time there, and started thinking about English exiles and what they found there. Like Byron, Francesca has left England because of a major scandal. The scandal not only helped develop her character, but set the plot in motion--the thing that brings James into collision with her.
Susan/Miranda: Readers who remember Dain, the hero of Lord of Scoundrels, will love James Cordier, another “outsider” Englishman of unusual ancestry who chooses to live apart from polite society. Do you think these two gentlemen would enjoy each other’s company, and why or why not?
Loretta: Two extreme Alpha males, both with Italian blood? I think they’d stir each other’s competitive instincts in a big way. They’re such different men, it’s hard to imagine their having a conversation. And while they’re trying to decide whether or not to like each other, all the women in the vicinity are swooning from testosterone overdose.
Susan/Miranda: The city of Venice is almost another character in this book, and you do a wonderful job of catching the city’s mix of East and West, and its general other-worldliness. Yet you’ve chosen to set your story in an unusual era in Venetian history, after the fall of the Republic and well after the city’s glory-days. Why?
Loretta: Mainly because it’s the time period in which I usually set my stories *g*. But it’s still an interesting time. The glory days were centuries earlier. It’s always had problems with allies and enemies, disastrous wars, plagues, corruption, etc. At the end of the 18th Century Napoleon stomps in. That’s the end of the Republic of Venice, and it’s sad and awful.
By 1820, the time of my story, yes, people (especially foreigners) are nostalgic about the Republic (and let’s bear in mind this is the Romantic era) but Venice, like my heroine, is resilient. And like her, it’s fun. Though many of its riches have been plundered, so much remains. It’s still beautiful and mysterious and it’s still distinctively Venice--like no other city in the world. What Byron found there was a refuge. Old and wicked as it was, it was a place of renewal for him, a place where he wasn’t judged and where he began to do his best work. It enchanted him--and my characters--exactly as it does visitors today.
Susan/Miranda: Courtesans are trendy right now in historical romances, albeit courtesans who often turn out to be faux-courtesans for the sake of Polite Readers. However, Francesca Bonnard is the real thing, earning a tidy living in a city infamous at the time for being the “Brothel of Europe.” How did you create a love story for a courtesan?
Loretta: I thought of La Traviata, and my brain does what it usually does when contemplating a tragedy: It changed the characters and plot in a way to make a happy ending. I had in mind, too, Harriette Wilson, the famous courtesan of the Regency Era, and so I made my courtesan unrepentant, with a zest for life, and a bawdy sense of humor. (I ought to add that your Bad Barbara of Royal Harlot also inspired me.) Francesca has been left penniless and friendless. She’s become a courtesan to survive--but she does so on her own terms. She chooses the men who are to have the privilege of keeping her, and only a very, very few qualify. She’s exclusive and extremely expensive. What she needed, I thought, was a man who truly appreciated what she had to offer, who’d done enough not-so-nice things himself not to judge her and who was at the same time honorable enough to win her trust.
To be continued . . . .
Please join us Friday for the conclusion of this interview, and more delicious discussions with Loretta about Venice, courtesans, and Lord Byron.
Originally posted at Word Wenches.

Here today, gondola tomorrow

Didst ever see a Gondola? For fear
You should not, I’ll describe it to you exactly:
‘Tis a long cover’d boat that’s common here,
Carved at the prow, built lightly, but compactly;
Row’d by two rowers, each call’d ‘Gondolier,’
It glides along the water looking blackly,
Just like a coffin clapt in a canoe,
Where none can make out what you say or do.
(Lord Byron, Beppo)

Thus opens Chapter One of Your Scandalous Ways.

Thanks to all the screen adaptations of Jane Austen's work, most readers have some idea of what, say, an early 19th C carriage looks like. But the early 19th C gondola--the carriage of Venice, whose streets are mostly water--may not be quite so clear.
Since gondolas play a big role in Your Scandalous Ways--much as a carriage might in one of my English-set “road books”--I’m going to expand on Byron’s evocative and witty description. And, as always, I shall supply visual aids.

The first thing we modern readers need to get used to is the cabin or felze. People think of a gondola ride today as romantic, but the passengers are in public view. In the time of my story, the passengers were likely to be inside the felze. It would have a door, casement windows, Venetian blinds, and a cushy interior. (Katherine Shaw kindly sent me this photo. Please scroll down this page to see another.)

Thus Byron’s “coffin clapt in a canoe.” It was quite private--and yes, in Your Scandalous Ways, I take advantage of that privacy in more than one scene, as in this excerpt.

He needed desperately to be taught a lesson.
Unhurriedly she slid shut the casement beside her and closed the blinds. She reached across him, letting her bosom brush against his chest, and closed the window and blinds on his side.
As she moved back to her place, she felt his chest rise and fall a little faster than it had done a moment earlier.
She folded her hands in her lap. “There,” she said. “No one can see.”
“There won’t be anything to see,” he said.
“We’ll see,” she said.

Today, a gondola ride is an expensive luxury, reserved mainly for tourists. It's faster and much cheaper (and noisier) to board one of the water taxis or buses. In Byron’s time the gondolas
were everywhere. Picture these black vessels with their little cabins, like black taxicabs, converging on a theater. “And round the theatres, a sable throng,” as Byron puts it.

Here's a recent view of the rear of La Fenice opera house, where Francesca's gondola would be waiting to collect her after the performance. Below it is a (mid?) 19th C view.

"After midnight, when the theaters let out and the parties began, the lights of hundreds of gondolas danced over the canals and candlelight twinkled in the windows of the palaces. Here, where no coach wheels and horses’ hooves clattered over pavement, one moved in a quiet punctuated only by voices. Carried over the water, conversations ebbed and flowed around her, as though in a great drawing room."

And no, the gondoliers did not then wear the straw hats with the ribbons and they did not sing.

In the time of my story, one would glide along in the vessel in a quiet world. As Lord Byron's friend Hobhouse wrote, “during the night a profound stillness reigns though the canals and streets, interrupted only by the warning cry of the gondoliers, and the drop of their paddles, or by the tinkling of some solitary guitar."

Research is the closest I can come to time travel. The challenge is to make my hero and heroine’s surroundings vivid in the reader’s mind without letting it intrude. I don’t spend pages going into all the details of gondolas. And I cannot illustrate my books. That's where blogs come in so handy.

Originally posted at Word Wenches.

Your palazzo or mine?

In response to readers who encouraged me to discuss the settings and other background material of Your Scandalous Ways, today we're taking a house tour.

“Ah, Venice,” James said as he took in the view--such as it was--in front of and behind him. The buildings and gondolas were merely darker shapes in the grey haze. “A fine place, indeed, but for the damp.”

I don’t know about the rest of you but I didn’t, really, know all that much about Venice before I embarked on Your Scandalous Ways. Casino Royale inspired my British agent hero. "Hmm,” I said to myself. “What would 007 be like in the early 19th century?” The film inspired my setting, too. Those climactic scenes in Venice awakened my curiousity.
I did not realize, for one thing, that Venice was built on a bunch of islands in a marshy lagoon.
Originally, it was where people from the mainland fled when the barbarians attacked in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. It was a safe haven because the lagoon was very dangerous and tricky to navigate. After a while, they quit going back to the mainland and started building. How they built is the miracle of Venice.

“All this, on top of water,” Sedgewick said, shaking his head as he looked about him. “What sort of people is it, I wonder, goes and builds a city on stilts on a swampy lot of islands?”
“Italians,” said James. “There’s a reason they once ruled the world, and a reason Venice once ruled the seas. You must at least give credit for a marvel of engineering.”

Here's a view of the Grand Canal and some of the case (houses) or palazzi (palaces). You’ll find “ca” and “palazzo” used interchangeably. Until the fall of the Republic (i.e., when Venice surrendered to Napoleon in 1797), only the Ducal Palace (that building to the right in the painting above this one) could be a palazzo. All other houses, no matter how grand, were simply houses, case. Afterward, the restriction went away. And so the same house might be a “ca” in one book and a "palazzo" in another.
These magnificent structures were indeed built on stilts packed close together. From my Eyewitness Travel Guide to Venice & the Veneto: “Pinewood piles were driven...25 feet...into the ground....They rested on the solid caranto (compressed clay) layer at the bottom of the lagoon.” On top of these were laid layers of brick and stone. The foundations were of Istrian marble, which resists damp. This book has some wonderful cutaway illustrations that are well worth a thousand words. But one need only look at the buildings and consider how much labor was involved--not to mention ingenuity--to appreciate the accomplishment.

They followed Zeggio up a staircase to the piano nobile, and found themselves in a vast central hall. This portego, as the Venetians called it, ran from one end of the house to the other.
It was clearly designed for show. The line of magnificent chandeliers down the center of the ceiling and rows of immense candelabra standing on tables along the wall--all dripping the famously magnificent glass work of Murano--would, when fully lit, have made a dazzling display of the gilt, the plaster ornamenting the walls, the sculpture, the paintings.

Here for your delectation are lots of pictures of Venetian palazzi.
Getting pictures of the exteriors was easy. Finding interiors was another matter--and for Your Scandalous Ways, it does matter, since many of the scenes are...um..intimate. Happily one of the Wench readers suggested Venetian Palazzi (ISBN 3-8228-7050-1--that's the English edition), which offers the proverbial visual feast. Copyright prevents my sharing those images with you, but there is some material online.
Here's one of the many internet sites I perused in the course of my research. This "Ceremonial Stair" in the Ca' Rezzonico is a fine example of the magnificent interiors. This site provides a floor plan of the Ca’ Rezzonico, too.
Virtually all Venetian palazzi have the same basic layout. A great hall runs from the side of the house facing the canal to the side facing land, usually overlooking a courtyard. The hall on the ground floor is the andron. The one on the main public floor or piano nobile, is called the portego. Rooms extend from either side of these central halls. Some buildings have interior staircases and some have exterior ones. Sometimes the building was extended to surround the courtyard. Side rooms open into other side rooms. But if you keep in mind that big central hall running from the front to the back of the house, and doors leading into rooms on both sides, you’ve got the general picture.
This shows the floor plan of the Ca’ Mocenigo, where Lord Byron lived, and the picture is of the poet at his leisure in his humble abode.
You can picture my hero James Cordier in a room like this, though he’s more likely to be gazing out of a window at Francesca’s palazzo across the canal than lounging on a sofa.

That brings us to the end of today's tour. Don't forget to tip the guide on the way out.

Originally posted at Word Wenches.

Worst job ever

I’m just back from a writers' conference, which reminded me, once again, that I have one of the best jobs in the world. My personal favorite best job ever of my whole experience was being an English major in college, which is at least partly because of the Lack of Responsibility Factor. But being a writer definitely qualifies as a Best Job.

I have had worse jobs, believe me.

As some of you already know, once upon a time, many, many eons ago, I was a meter maid. People screamed at me, made fun of me, and some even threatened me with bodily injury. The downtown characters--the drunks and extremely demented people--raved at me or demanded money or insisted I arrest figments of their imaginations. We had to wear polyester--and this was the old style polyester that did not breathe at all--and we courted heatstroke in the summer and frostbite in winter. Downtown Worcester, wherein lay our “beats,” is small but very hilly. In the beginning especially, I ended the day with aching legs and feet so sore I wept . I wore the ugliest possible shoes for the comfort factor. No matter. I still got blisters. I got sunburned and windburned and broke out in mysterious rashes. When people fought their tickets, I had to go to court, which terrified me. And I had to communicate with police officers almost daily. I was in one of my college dropout phases at the time (these went on for about a decade), and in those days college youth tended to view the police with extreme mistrust. Trusted or not, they were a species of which I had no experience, let alone understanding. For me, it was like talking to Extra Terrestrials, all of them heavily armed and some of whom thought meter maids a far lower and more repellent life form than the drunks & crazy people.

This, however, was not the worst job I ever had, not by a long stretch. I actually kind of liked it a good part of the time because our bosses and the office staff were really nice and the other meter maids were fun to hang with. Bonus: Within a few months, I was in amazing shape. With very strong legs.

The worst job I ever had looked really glamorous. I was hired to sell groovy clothes and shoes in a boutique. I loved fashion magazines, so this seemed to be the ideal job for moi, at the time, a college dropout (again). But as those who’ve watched the reality shows know, what goes on behind the scenes is not always pretty. I got blisters from having to wear fashionable platform shoes for 8-10 hours a day on a concrete floor thinly covered with carpeting. We had to climb up and down ladders while carrying stacks of jeans for the shelves. We used seam rippers to take out the manufacturer’s tags from the clothes and then we hand-stitched in the store’s tags.

But hey, I worked in a jewelry store over the course of several years, and learned the art of writing codes & numbers on price tags barely visible to the naked eye (the kind that went on expensive jewelry of the type my heroine in Your Scandalous Ways would wear). That was tedious, too, but I didn’t mind. It appealed to the fussbudget (now called OCD) in me. I don’t mind detail work. It’s retail that gets to me.

The problem, in short, was Dealing with the Public for 6 days a week, 8-12 hours a day. I’m not an extrovert. In fact, others would find it a considerable challenge to be less extroverted. My Personality Type came out INTJ--at 93% Introverted. Let’s add in the facts that I was still more or less college age (read Immature) and had an Attitude. So I didn’t deal really well with people who needed size 12 and insisted something was wrong with the clothes I was selling because size 8 didn’t fit or the ones who tried on ninety-eleven sweaters only to leave with nothing, telling me the clothes were too expensive or the ones who flung silk blouses on the floor for the menials (us) to pick up, etc., etc. Then there were the shoplifters. And the drunks & crazy people who wandered in, thinking we were--what? The bus station?

Plus, I really didn’t have confidence in my ability to put the right shirt together with the right tie, so I always had a small panic attack when I had to wait on a male person, even though they were less likely than female persons to infuriate me. Too, we had to keep the place shipshape, folding clothes, endlessly folding & even ironing. We had to keep the glass display cases sparkly clean and dress up the dummies. Then there was the behind-the-scenes backbiting and stabbing and alliance-shifting. All of which happens everywhere, but for some reason it felt more like Purgatory there. Looking back, with the advantage of age and wisdom, I think it was simply a matter of a horribly wrong personality fit.

It was useful in terms of giving me a degree of understanding of what it was like to be a servant in early 19th C London.

But it was MY WORST JOB, ever.

Meanwhile, there are those, I know, who’d run screaming from my present job: Sitting alone all day in front of a computer listening for voices in your head? There are people who couldn’t, wouldn’t do it. They are not tempted, even though it means not having to wear pantyhose and being able to work in one's pajamas.

My best job could be your worst job and vice versa.

RevMelinda won a Loretta Chase book because she asked the question, “What was the worst job you ever had?” And I answered it.

What was your worst job ever?

Originally posted at Word Wenches.

The Fallen Woman

In historical romances, we often encounter women who become prostitutes or courtesans in order to survive. An innocent girl is seduced by a blackguard and cast out by her family. A widow finds herself penniless. A governess is impregnated by the dissolute master of the house. Forced to fend for themselves, the women resort to the oldest profession.

It didn't always happen that way, though.

“I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of Lord Craven. Whether it was love, or the severity of my father, or the depravity of my own heart, or the winning arts of the noble Lord, which induced me to leave my paternal roof and place myself under his protection, does not now much signify: or if it does, I am not in the humour to gratify curiosity in this matter.”

Thus begin the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson (1786-1846), the most famous of the Regency era’s courtesans. (Note re my previous blog, The Fallen Woman: Harriette was 15; the Earl of Craven was 31). She wasn’t the only one in her family to flee respectability. Her sisters left home, too (one at thirteen), to become Fashionable Impures. Harriette was and is the memorable one, however. Her memoirs, first published in 1825, are amazingly readable, and that is not something one can say about most early 19th C prose. As I’ve noted before, there’s a reason some authors live on and others don’t.

The memoirs offer many clues to Harriette’s popularity. Apparently, she was not deemed a great beauty. But she was great fun, as the insouciant beginning of her tale promises. Though what passed for wit then might make us scratch our heads, she could hold her own with the men. She was a saucy wench.

Being entertaining was a crucial skill in a courtesan’s repertoire--but to understand this, we need to understand what a courtesan was, and how she differed from prostitutes.

My shorthand definition of a courtesan is usually “high priced call girl.” That’s grossly oversimplifying and perhaps misleading. It’s hard to convey to a 21st century world what courtesans were.

Something like high-priced call girls did exist in Georgian times. One finds in Harris's List of Covent-Garden Ladies a “Miss ___, at Mrs. Ross’s, No. 7, Wardour-street.” She charged five guineas, where the majority charged half a guinea to a guinea. A guinea was one pound, one shilling. In today's money, that seems to be nearly £100 (about $200).

Women like Harriette were more closely related to the courtesans of, say, 17th century Venice (this painting is of the famous Veronica Franco) or ancient Greece, though not quite the same, either. The courtesans of earlier times were very well educated and cultured. They might dance, sing, play an instrument, write poetry (as Franco did). Harriette and her ilk were not educated in this way, yet they filled a similar function. Men associated with courtesans not simply for sex but for conversation and entertainment, in societies where marriages were made for political and dynastic reasons and wives and husbands tended to live in separate worlds.

Courtesans lived in the man’s world, a freer world. They paid a high price for their freedom, but one can understand why some chose this life. The aria “Sempre libera,” from La Traviata, might well be their theme song.

The respectable woman woman was bound by rules. No sex or even knowledge of sex before marriage. Stand so, sit so, speak so. She doesn’t want to appear too intellectual or too opinionated. Until she’s launched into Society, she’s had little to do with gentlemen outside her family. Being closely chaperoned, she’s not likely to learn much more about them until she marries one of them. Our young lady may be beautiful and have a delightful personality --but she’s an innocent, and men are expected to be on good behavior with her.

With the Harriette Wilsons of the world, men behaved more or less as they did among themselves. With such women, the men could behave as they did with other men.

Scholars and others have pointed out that the only time a woman had power over men was during courtship. A gently bred girl gets a taste of this power (if she’s popular) during her Season, and one can certainly understand her wishing to prolong the experience.

But courtesans wielded such power over the course of their careers. They suffered the same--if not worse--vicissitudes their more respectable sisters endured but they had the power to say yes or no to men. If her protector was unsatisfactory, a courtesan could replace him. She might travel where she liked, see whom she liked, without asking anybody’s permission. She did not have to mind her Ps and Qs. She could tell dirty jokes, though she would avoid appearing too coarse. In short, she might behave more like a man.

For women like Harriette, the path to sin was the road to freedom.

This isn’t to say it couldn’t be the road to misery, or that choosing this path wasn't an enormous gamble, with the odds against her. A courtesan’s career was bound to be brief, and though Harriette lived a long life, many died young, often in the gutter. OTOH, being respectably married wasn’t security for everyone. A spouse might gamble away the family fortune. (Harriette did marry, and it was her husband who spent the money she’d made with her memoirs.) For the courtesan, venereal disease was practically a certainty. Yet it was a possiblity for the respectable wife of any man who’d had premarital or extramarital sex--and a large segment of the male aristocracy was promiscuous. The courtesan risked death in childbirth and miscarriage, and the death of children, as other women did. Titled ladies had no guarantees their marriages would be safe or stable. They might be abused or abandoned or divorced. Meanwhile, a courtesan might marry a nobleman. (Harriette’s sister Sophia married Lord Berwick--when he was forty-two and she was still a teenager.) Life wasn't easy on women, respectable or not. It's not hard to understand why some women went for pleasure and freedom: Play now, pay later.

Why did Harriette run away with Lord Craven? Was it for any of the reasons she suggested? Or was she a woman who chafed at the restrictions of her time--a woman better suited to the world of the early 21st century, say, than the early 19th? We’ll never know for sure. But when I recall that she was a teenager when she bolted, I find myself thinking that maybe Harriette was one of those girls who just wanted to have fun. At 15, how many think of consequences?

photo credit (image of Harriette from Frontispiece of the 1825 edition)

So let’s have some fun and pretend. Imagine you’re a young woman of Harriette’s time. What path do you think you'd follow? Would you believe in the rules and do your best to follow them? Would you follow the rules but chafe under them? Or would you to take the gamble of being a Bad Girl?

Originally posted at Word Wenches.

Two Young to Marry?

Some years ago I wrote a novella, “The Mad Earl’s Bride,” for an anthology titled THREE WEDDINGS AND A KISS. The Big Name on the cover was Katheleen E. Woodiwiss, and the book rocketed to the top of all the bestseller lists. I’m not sure it ever went out of print, but whether it did or didn’t it’s decidedly in print now. Wench Susan/Miranda called me from a Borders bookstore to tell me it was being pushed to the front of the store. This month it’s part of their Buy 4 get 1 Free deal.

All of which fits in nicely with today’s bridal theme.

Sharon Baumgartner is going to win an autographed Loretta Chase book for asking the following question:
It seems like most of the heroines in historical romances are 18, 19, 20. There are some older, but usually those are referred to as being VERY old to be still looking for a husband and pretty much firmly "on the shelf". When my daughter was 18 or 19, I would have been very concerned about her getting married, thinking that she was not at all mature enough for taking that step. I know that a lot of marriages back in the Regency era (or whatever era the historical might be set in) were arranged by the families for reasons having nothing to do with personal selection (except in our favorite books, of course). But my question is were the young women back then that much more mature than girls today? Even if they had been trained to do all of the things to run a household, etc., that they were expected to do, would they have been emotionally ready for marriage? Or do authors give them the correct age for marrying at the time but write them with more maturity?

Let me start by saying that my paternal grandmother was married by parental arrangement when she was fourteen years old. My maternal grandmother married for love (it was a shocking thing to do in Albania at that time) when she was sixteen. In those days, the bride went to live in the groom’s household where his mother ruled and her daughters-in-law did what they were told. This happened in the 20th century. Were my grandmothers more mature than today’s 16-year-old girl? Possibly. Or maybe not. Maybe they simply had less freedom and fewer choices. And maybe maturity depends on the girl.

In my grandmothers’ time and place, girls didn’t have a lot of choices. They got married and had children. They would have been trained for marriage: how to run a household, cook & clean& sew & so forth--or (depending on socioeconomic class) supervise those who did. So they were better prepared for marriage than today’s average American sixteen-year-old.

When creating women for my stories, I assume that, while manner and mores change, young women of two hundred years ago must have something in common with those of today. Some girls are mature and responsible at a young age. Then there are the ones like Lydia Bennett of PRIDE & PREJUDICE. It’s hard to imagine Lydia ever maturing, isn’t it? Look at her sisters Jane and Elizabeth. They’re in their early twenties, and far more mature than their mother.

Mature or not, most women needed to marry, and the simple fact was and is, young women--generally speaking--are more attractive to men--generally speaking. Look at all those Gidget & Geezer movies. Look at all those Gidget & Geezer marriages in the land of millionaires and movie stars. Do the Geezers care if their Gidgets are mature?

Women had then, as many do today, a real fear that past a certain magical age (past their “first bloom”), they would become unappealing or invisible to men. This is a truly worrisome prospect for some families, absolutely, in the Regency era. Think about Mrs. Bennett, frantic to get her daughters married ASAP. She had a genuine economic concern: When her husband died, she & her girls could be thrown out of their house, as was the case with the Dashwood women in SENSE AND SENSIBILITY. Think of the sorry plight of genteel but impoverished single women of this time. How do they support themselves? Mostly, they can’t. Mostly, they depend on others. Being “on the shelf” wasn’t simply rejection; it could be a financial catastrophe.

In Judith Schneid Lewis’s IN THE FAMILY WAY: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy 1750-1860, I find ladies marrying from the age of 15 (Elizabeth, Lady Holland, b 1771) to 37 (Susan, Marchioness of Stafford, b 1731). Princess Charlotte, King George IV’s heir, married at age 20. Queen Victoria was 21. The majority were married between the ages of 18 and 20, but there are quite a few marrying in their early to mid-twenties. Anne Isabella Milbanke was 23 when she married Lord Byron.

Mainly, though, as in the books Sharon refers to, upper class women were marrying at 18, 19, 20. And from what I’ve read, they were at about the same maturity level as young women of 18, 19, and 20 today. The difference is that they were expected to get married at that age and were trained to be wives and mothers as well as in the duties of the lady of the house.

I’ve made my heroines various ages but tend toward older heroines--mid to late twenties, and one heroine (Mirabel of MISS WONDERFUL), thirty-one. This is mainly because I simply find them more interesting when they have some life experience. And that’s why, too, a number of my heroines are widows. Whatever their age, I’ve made them mature, though I try to show why they might be more so or more responsible than other girls of their social class and age. Being left motherless at a young age, being educated in an unusual way, having to fend for oneself, having to cope with a distant or psychologically troubled parent, etc.--these are all ways of giving a character maturity beyond her years. Gwendolyn Adams, the heroine of “The Mad Earl’s Bride,” is one such character. She needs to be levelheaded and mature, because the arranged marriage she agrees to is a very challenging one.

Do you think young women were/are emotionally ready for marriage at 18, 19, 20? How do you feel about young heroines? Do you think young women 100-200 years ago were or weren’t like young women of today?

Originally posted at Word Wenches.