Elena Greene, for Lady Dearing’s Masquerade in the Regency Romance category, and Lady Midnight by Amanda McCabe for Historical Romantic Mystery/Gothic.
Go Riskies!
Elena Greene, for Lady Dearing’s Masquerade in the Regency Romance category, and Lady Midnight by Amanda McCabe for Historical Romantic Mystery/Gothic.
Go Riskies!
Here are some of my favorites of 2005:
My favorite Regencies that I read for the first time included Nonnie St George’s Courting Trouble (yes, it came out halfway through 2004, but I’m way behind in my reading!) and Judith Laik’s The Lady is Mine. (By the way, I’m following Amanda’s lead and not listing books by fellow Risky-ers — or we’d all just list each other’s books and, how boring would that be?) 🙂 By the way, yes, I think the woman pictured on this cover is definitely falling out of her dress.
My favorite Regencies that I re-read include Joan Smith’s Sweet and Twenty.
My favorite Regency reference book of 2005 is LETTERS FROM LAMBETH: The Correspondence of the Reynolds family with John Freeman Milward Dovaston 1808-1815, introduced and edited by Joanna Richardson. For such a long, dry title, it’s surprisingly sprightly, and delightfully droll. Two of my favorite quotes from the letters of John Hamilton Reynolds that it includes are:
The arrival of the Shrewsbury Chronicle has spurred up my head & collected the few grains of wisdom that wandered about my spacious Scull into one large grain & from that LARGE GRAIN you are to expect whatever comes upon this Paper.
I am ordered by my Mother and Father to return you their unfeigned thanks for noticeing the Slovenly & noncencical Letters of Jack Reynolds. I always had a confounded bad opinion of his writings and your remark has confirmed it . . .
And, yes, the creative spelling is all Reynolds’s.
My favorite Regency-related movie was the new PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. My favorite Christmas gifts were the dvds of the Ciaran Hinds/Amanda Root PERSUASION, the Gwyneth Paltrow/Jeremy Northam EMMA, and the Jennifer Ehle/Colin Firth PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. (All of them were gifts from my husband. Yep, I picked a good one. Oh, and in exchange I gave him the complete HORATIO HORNBLOWER series starring Ioan Gruffudd, so I guess we’ll be watching a lot of Regency television come 2006!)
What were some of your favorite Regency things this year? Please share!
And for those of you taking the Read-a-Regency challenge: have you made any progress in the past (presumably extremely busy) week? If so, please update us on your reading experiences!
Happy New Year all! And may 2006 bring many Regency delights!
Cara
Cara King, www.caraking.com
MY LADY GAMESTER — out now from Signet Regency!
Happy Boxing Day, all Risky Regency readers! I hope Santa brought you just what you asked for. 🙂 And I also hope you aren’t quite as brain-fogged as I am, after a weekend of food, drink, and family festivities/quarrels (they are sometimes so hard to tell apart!).
All this week, the Riskies are going to be doing a sort of “year in review” thing. What were some of our favorite reads of 2005? What were some of YOURS? I’m starting off with my own “best of” list. One quick note (or three)–I didn’t count any of the Riskies’ books on my list, because that would have been the whole list. I didn’t count non-romances, contemporary romances, or anything but historicals. And I tried to stick to Regency-set books, but a few others crept in. 🙂
Amanda’s Favorite Historical Romance Reads of 2005 (in no particular order):
1) Susan Carroll’s The Dark Queen and The Courtesan (okay, not Regency-set, but these books were wonderful. Had to count them)
2) Loretta Chase’s Mr. Impossible
3) Myretta Robens’ Once Upon a Sofa
4) Kate Huntington’s To Tempt a Gentleman
5) Cheryl Sawyer’s The Chase
6) Gaelen Foley’s One Night for Sin
7) MJ Putney’s Stolen Magic (possibly the first time I’ve ever read a story where the hero was a unicorn)
8) Shana Abe’s The Smoke Thief (ditto above, only dragons)
9) Barbara Metzger’s Ace of Hearts
10) Liz Carlyle’s The Devil to Pay
11) Diane Perkins’ The Marriage Bargain
12) Jude Morgan’s Passion (breaking my own rule here–this is not really romance, but great historical fiction about women of the Romantic period. I was totally engrossed in this story)
13) I’ve just started reading Julia Justiss’ The Courtesan, but so far it is shaping up to be a great read
And that’s it for 2005! I didn’t read as much romance this year as I have in the past, but most of what I read was great. What were some of your own favorites?
I’m creeping into Cara territory here with a theater-related post–about the world of pantomime, a peculiarly English form of theatrical entertainment that is still popular today. It’s an incongruous mix of medieval mystery play, Commedia dell’arte, vaudeville, and musical comedy. The Principal Boy (male lead) is played by a woman wiht great legs. There’s a stock female character called The Dame who is played by a man (the Monty Python crew were not the only ones to cross-dress at the drop of a knicker). Audience participation is encouraged. In its current manifestation the pantomime features stars from TV soaps and is full of political jokes and double entendres.
Commedia dell’arte, a comedic form with stock characters, tumbling, acrobatics and buffoonery came from Italy to England in the seventeenth century. The most popular characters–Harlequin (a wily servant), Columbine (female lead) and Pantalone (comic old man–sorry, this was never very PC)–infiltrated the theater, and an entertainment was developed in three parts: A serious or classical work, followed by a lighter popular tale (Cinderella or Aladdin, for instance, still popular today as panto subjects), and concluded with the Harlequinade. The Harlequinade featured acrobatics and slapstick and was introduced by an elaborate transformation scene using all the latest hi-tech devices of the theater. Imagine that you’ve gone to the theater to see “King Lear.” After the tragedy, the same actors perform a musical version of “Cinderella.” After a lot of light effects, music, moving scenery, fountains, women in tights flying etc., the actor who played Lear does some funny stuff with a dog and a string of sausages, as a minor player in the spills, chills and thrills chase scenario of Harlequin and Columbine. Ah, a full night of the theater in eighteenth-century London–all human life is there. There’s no wait at the bar because you brought your own, and no wait for the bathrooms because there are none.
Joseph Grimaldi was England’s most famous clown and so popular that the character of the Clown became the lead in the Harlequinade. At one time he played the Clown at both Covent Garden and Sadler’s Wells, dashing from one theater to another. He was a skilled dancer, mime, acrobat, actor and sleight of hand magician. The Harlequinade died out, possibly coinciding with the death of Grimaldi, its greatest clown, but the second part of the original three-part entertainment adopted some of its characteristics (the slapstick and tumbling) to evolve into the pantomime, played at Christmas and Easter. In Victorian times the Drury Lane Theater was the leading presenter of elaborate pantomime performances, and stars of the music hall made guest appearances.
For great pics and musical examples (including Grimaldi’s signature song, “Hot Codlins” with audience participation) go to
www.peopleplayuk.org
www.its-behind-you.com
Here’s the complete text of “A History of Pantomime” by R.J. Broadbent (1901) www.gutenberg.org
www.pantoscripts.com
Meanwhile, so you can savor this sophisticated form of comedy, here’s an excerpt from a modern version of Aladdin. Widow Twanky (the Dame) is doing laundry with her sons Wishee and Washee:
DAME: Here, did I tell you I nearly won the football pools last week.
WASHEE: Did you really mum?
DAME: Yes I did. My homes were all right. My aways were all right. ( Pulls tatty pair of bloomers from the tub). But my draws let me down.
WISHEE: ( Looking in the tub) I see you’ve got the laundry for ******* United again ( pulls out strip – holds it out for everyone to see, with big holes in it). Hey, what are these holes in it?
DAME: Well, everyone says they’ve got holes in their defence. That proves it.
WASHEE: ( Pulling out another huge pair of bloomers) And whose are these?
DAME: I could do with some of these. ( Singing to tune of My Fair Lady) “All I want is some knickers like these, to keep me warm from my neck to me knees, oh wouldn’t it be lovely.” Did you know I once had some knickers made out of a Union Jack.
WISHEE: Weren’t they uncomfortable?
DAME: Not once I’d taken the flagpole out.
happy xmas!
Janet
I am toast. All the gifts have been bought, the cards mailed, the presents all almost wrapped. Never mind the cookies, I made one batch and taught my son a few new words when the dough wouldn’t quite roll out the way I wanted it to.
But with Christmas approaching, of course, all people’s thoughts turn to–good will? Sure, but there’s something else. Peace on earth? YES, PLEASE. And? Oh, yeah. The presents!
In 2001, the year I started working on A Singular Lady, my husband hunted down a bunch of Regency reference books for me. He got Donald Low’s Regency Underworld, C. Willett Cunnington’s English Women’s Clothing In The Nineteenth Century, and a few other cool Regency-era books. It was a fabulous Christmas because it told me my husband supported my efforts to be a writer, and was trying to give me the tools to help me. I cried a lot that year because I felt validated.
So, yeah, this year I am toast, but even though the idea of stressing less and sleeping more IS appealing, I would miss the zest and excitement of the Christmas holiday (not to mention my mother-in-law’s homemade donuts. Just saying). Of getting the perfect gift because someone thought about it, and watching their faces as they open what you thought of, and then bought, for them (me, I’m hoping for some out-of-print Mary Balogh traditional Regencies).
Happy Holidays, Riskies! Happy Holidays, Readers!
Megan 