Historical Romance comes to Ham House!

The news this week that Harlequin Mills & Boon has teamed up with the National Trust to offer a historical romance set at Ham House is exciting for all those of us who enjoy historical romance, stately homes and the two together. The book, Scandalous Innocent by Juliet Landon, is a commemorative novel marking 400 years of Ham House but it is hoped that this will be just the first in a series of joint Mills & Boon and National Trust books. There’s a lot of potential!

Of course using a particular house as inspiration for the setting of a historical romance is something that many authors have done plenty of times before. Joanna Maitland, Elizabeth Rolls and I used an adapted version of Ashdown House as the setting for our anthology A Regency Invitation. I also used Ashdown to stand in as Delaval in The Penniless Bride. In the book the heroine thought it was quite an unusual building (ugly was the word she used!) The hero was most offended to hear his family home dismissed thus!

The difference with the current HMB/National Trust collaboration is that the house is specifically named and the story features as characters real people who lived there. On its website the National Trust suggests Dunham Massey, Montacute and Plas Newydd as other properties where love stories might provide the potential for a book. I'm sure we could come up with other suggestions of our own! Again I think Ashdown House would be perfect since it is said that the house was built expressly for “the love of a woman who never lived to see it,” Elizabeth of Bohemia, the Winter Queen, by her devoted cavalier William, First Earl of Craven. Or, if we want something from the Georgian period there is the Beautiful Lady Craven (as she styled herself!) with her rather racy love affairs. And a generation later we have the Regency Earl of Craven, soldier and rakehell, who married an actress. Plenty of material there – and how I would love to write those stories! I imagine that my colleagues on this blog must also be brimming with ideas of houses and characters that would suit these books.

So what do you think? Is the collaboration a good way of getting more National Trust members to read historical romance and of interesting historical romance readers in visiting National Trust properties? Is there a particular house anywhere in the world that you would like to see featured in a romance? Or a particular love story you would like to see told?

UK National Year of Reading

This year is the UK's National Year of Reading, a country-wide campaign to encourage people to join libraries and to read for pleasure or personal advancement. The slogan is 'Reading - Anytime, Anything, Anywhere'. UK Regency authors Louise Allen and Nicola Cornick have been appointed as Writers in Residence for Hertfordshire and Wiltshire respectively, and will be getting out into the community to promote the joys of reading, offering talks and workshops and an insight into a writer’s life and a Regency author’s life in particular.

Harlequin Mills and Boon said of their involvement in the programme: `We are thrilled to be part of the National Year of Reading during our centenary year, because if anyone knows the value of a good book, it's our fantastic Mills and Boon authors!' We look forward to going out and talking about reading, writing and the Regency!

Not Quite Gardener's World - getting distracted amongst the Brussel Sprouts

I was checking the proofs for A Mistletoe Masquerade, my contribution to the Mills & Boon Christmas anthology for 2008, yesterday and was reminded of my search for the Regency Brussel Sprout.

Did they grow them, did they like them? That was the question. There was no sign of them in Thomas Mawe's Every Man His Own Gardener. My copy is the 14th edition - 1794 - and I didn't think veg growing would have changed that much in twenty years. Then I thought of checking in Grandfather's copy of The Cottage Gardeners Dictionary (1852, but then Grandpa was not given to the new-fangled and this had probably been his grandfather's copy.) And there it was - Brussels Borecole or Sprouts. Back to Mawe and sure enough - both Brown and Green Borecole "...greatly esteemed, for their being so hardy as to resist the severest cold; and they eat extremely sweet, but especially the sprouts which arise from the sides of the stalks."

I should have gone back to my proofs at that point, having checked the spelling and made sure the gardener's boy was doing the right thing with them, but any distraction is welcome when there are proofs to be read. What about recipes? I have four original cookery books for the early 19th century and not one has anything for Brussels Sprouts, Borecole or Cole. Perhaps the traditional method of boiling them until dead dates back to then, or perhaps it was just too simple to require spelling out.

OK, definitely time to get back to the proofs... But then I found myself looking for images of Regency gardens. While the professional gardeners were toiling in the vegetable garden it seems the gentry were indulging in a little recreational gardening themselves. I collect Regency bat-printed china (nothing to do with flying mammals, it has black and white printed images created by pressing a specially coated 'bat' onto the cup or plate) and many of those feature garden scenes.



The handsome gent presenting his lady with a rose isn't, when you look at it carefully, doing anything so romantic. What he is holding is a cutting - no wonder she looks decidedly underwhelmed.

And even ladies were gardening. How much they actually did outside, other than dead heading the roses, I'm not sure, but here is an earnest young woman tending her pot plants. Her outfit, illustrated in Ackermann's Repository (September 1820) is apparently "Cottage Dress" - a nice simple affair for getting amongst the weeds in!
And now, definitely time to get back to those proofs!


Louise Allen

The Big Mills & Boon Centenary Debate!

The Mills and Boon Centenary debate took place at the Oxford Literary Festival last week and one hundred and fifty romance readers, authors and supporters came along to enjoy a wide-ranging discussion on whether heroes and heroines had changed with the times. Favourite heroes and heroines mentioned included Anne Elliot from Persuasion and Georgette Heyer’s rakes, beaux and spirited heroines. It was generally agreed that heroes and heroines of such quality had stood the test of time and were as relevant now as they were a hundred or even two hundred years ago. The panel and audience also discussed whether Regency heroines would have been as obsessed with their weight and appearance as the Bridget Jones generation!

Other topics covered included an impromptu show of hands from the audience as to whether readers thought there were too many love scenes in books these days and whether people skipped these in order to move on with the plot! A brave few maintained that for them the love scenes were an integral part of the story and something they would never skip. There was also a lively debate on whether men could write romance from a female point of view. The evening was rounded off with a complementary glass of champagne from sponsors Mills & Boon as the authors signed copies of their books and readers were given a goody bag to take away. All in all a most entertaining event and thank you to all who came along to support it. I hope that a good time was had by all!

Nicola