Taking Note in Austenesque Romance
Using references in historical fiction
Recent reviews of The Sailor’s Rest—the crossover event between Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion—have commended my attention to detail and research. However, as a historian, I have been trained to always—always—cite sources for information and opinion that is not common knowledge. The practice illustrates that I am being rigorous and not making it up as I go.
An example: I just finished a recent release that had a secondary character, Lady Maitland, becoming Jane Bennet’s sponsor (in the Epilogue). The two traveled with her husband, General Sir Thomas Maitland, as he went to the Mediterranean to become Malta’s Governor.[1]
The name Sir Thomas Maitland struck me as I had used him in Sailor’s Rest. I was forced to have an unmarried sister be his hostess for Anne, Wentworth, Darcy, and Elizabeth because Maitland had never married. How easy it would have been for me to simply have used “his wife Lady Maitland stood as his hostess” and not have had to pray that the General had a sister. Fortunately, he did: Lady Isabel Maitland.
When I put something in my books—especially historical persons—I want my readers to know I have done due diligence so they can trust what I write. As a result, I can no more stop writing cites than I could cease breathing.
That has put me lightly crosswise with readers who do offer the valid criticism that excessive endnotes tend to detract from their reading experience. However, an e-book reader can move past the notation if they desire or highlight the note in the text to get a full reference. I have begun deleting notes in print books.
Please consider how notes work in my books.
In The Maid and the Footman, I decided to create a “proposal without words” where Henry Wilson asks for Annie Reynolds’s hand. She is seated at the pianoforte in Burleigh House’s Blue Parlor, having been sent there by Miss Catherine Bennet to set her up for the proposal. While Miss Reynolds waited unknowingly, she began to play the instrument. Henry slips in.
Annie softly exhaled as she ended the melody. Not shifting in her seat, she reached up with her unadorned left hand and gently clasped his right where it rested on her collarbone. Her eyes remained closed so as not to break the trance.
Henry dropped to his knees and carefully—so carefully—grasped hers where they were under the pianoforte. He turned her body on the bench to face him.
Her face, rosy in the room’s firelight was turned down to his. Her eyes slowly opened as she beheld her world. The golden brown pools glistened with hope and joy.
He gripped her hands in his, holding them prayerfully. Here was his Westminster. His love echoed through the spires, rising like the great buttresses holding the walls of the mighty cathedral to join with the bells tolling a full peal[2]. His Annie…his love…his life.
And there, in the last paragraph is one of those things. Somehow, I recalled that a royal marriage, coronation, or other great national events would be marked with a “full peal” of the bells at Westminster Abbey. Now, however, the historian in me took over because I could not drop such an interesting tidbit in the middle of Annie and Henry’s story.
So, I checked it out. And, at the bottom of this post (all the way after the excerpt) you will find the reference. The fine folks at the Abbey itself advise that a full peal is over 5,000 changes and takes nearly three hours to complete. Gentlemen in the audience: I do not know about you, but when my wife of forty-six years said, “My Mom thinks we ought to get married. What do you think?” I nearly shouted back “That’s what I have been saying for five years!” Think all the bells at Holy Name Cathedral, St. James, and Fourth Presbyterian (all Chicago) let loose all at once? You bet!
Many folks tend to think notes are truly boring. However, I see several uses for notes: they answer the questions “Why/What;” they offer backstory, and context; or they respond to the author’s desire to interact with the reader outside of the actual story.
Why/What Notes
In Volume One of the Bennet Wardrobe, The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey, Mr. Bennet receives a note from someone. The note is in an envelope that is sealed. But, wait a moment. Thomas Bennet is sitting in his bookroom in January 1812. Were envelopes even around? Time to look it up.
I learned that
“The machine to apply adhesive to the seams and flap of machine-made envelopes was not fully developed until the 1880s.”
Not common knowledge to anyone. If I had let it flow by, I justifiably would have been pilloried by astute readers. Having an envelope in 1812 was just as much a sin as having (I kid you not) Darcy receiving a telegram from an investigator looking for Wickham. BUT: the letter was written in 1932, so the envelope had long since replaced folded paper and sealing wax.
In the aforementioned missive opened by Mr. Bennet, I have the writer using the word “closure.” This was very intentional on my part as 1) The writer had undergone years of psychoanalysis and 2) she was writing with a vocabulary of a person living in 1932 (see The Keeper and The Exile Pt. 1). As I have a word maven as one of my beta readers (yes Carole…no teenagers, only adolescents!), I knew I had to explain that I knew what I was doing. Here is the note justifying the use of “closure.”
In the modern sense… Sense of the "tendency to create ordered and satisfying wholes" is 1924, from Gestalt psychology. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=closure
Context Notes
Sometimes an explanation is necessary to establish a very clear context for a set of actions undertaken by a character.
In The Exile: Kitty Bennet and the Belle Époque, I was curious how large Kitty’s fortune would grow to in seventy-five years. Why? First, I wanted to know how wealthy she would have been (an interesting conundrum for a young lady who had been raised in the knowledge that her family was one fall from horseback away from poverty). But, her wealth was an important plot motivator for the villain in the story: Lord Junius Winters.
I felt that it was necessary for me to justify the figure at which I arrived (somewhat north of £200,00) for her holdings when she arrived in 1886. I did not want an error detracting from the overwhelming impact of that figure.
Kitty’s £10,000 dowry from Darcy and Bingley along with her £1,000 share of her mother’s dowry calculated at 4% compound interest (annual) would be £208,398 in 1886 after 75 years of investment. Her annual income off of that principal at 4% would have been about £8,300. That £8,300 would be the 2016 equivalent of £980,000 per year. See http://www.in2013dollars.com/1886-GBP-in-2016
Do you think Winters’s efforts to get his hands on Kitty’s trust fund were worth it? For my American readers, that £980,000 is nearly $1.5 MILLION! A Year!
However, my favorite Context note is the manner in which Colonel Fitzwilliam’s sword is referenced. Austenesque writers have often credited the good Colonel with offering that he “should have run that (pick your epithet) through with my sword. I immediately wanted to ask, “And what was that sword? Describe it.”
There is a psychological reason behind that. I will answer with a question: “While a steak knife is as deadly as a sword, which jellies your innards more?” The sword, of course, is the most common response. Why? Because it is a brutal weapon, hacking, amputating, capable of splitting you from (as Sir Thomas Malory wrote) “from guzzle to gatch,” and inflicting such heinous damage that you would run from the field.
Would General Sir Richard Fitzwilliam have fought with a gentleman’s rapier? I think not and put those thoughts into the mouth of Mary Bennet in The Keeper as she dressed down three militia officers who had the temerity to harass her, Maria Lucas, and Georgiana Darcy on the streets of Meryton. She was telling them that Fitzwilliam was protecting all those who lived in Meryton, but particularly the Bennets and Darcys.
“I have seen his working sword. It is not shiny and bright like that little toad sticker you wear. His is a man’s weapon, heavy to cut through bone and gristle, hued like pewter, and with a blade longer than your arm. It is nicked and scarred and so worn from constant sharpening that it is more rapier than saber.”
What sword would the General carry? His daily weapon which, as Mary put it, “had dispatched more of Napoleon’s horde to Hades than you can imagine,” was likely the Pattern 1796 Heavy Cavalry Sword. See the note:
“The trooper’s sword, and the officer’s undress sword, was a dedicated cutting weapon with a broad heavy blade and was renowned as being completely unfit for delicate swordsmanship.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1796_Heavy_Cavalry_Sword
Dialogue Notes
In The Exile, a character in 1886 comments that new legal protections protected young Kitty Bennet, unlike Miss Darcy in 1810, from fortune hunters. The danger to Georgie was the practice known as coverture. That word was never used in the body of The Exile. More needed to be said, and I took that opportunity in the note.
Coverture was a practice based upon the legal fiction that upon marriage a man and a woman became one in the eyes of the law. Thus all of a woman’s property became her husband’s to do with as he pleased. Hence Wickham’s search for an heiress—or for that matter Colonel Fitzwilliam’s. Darcy and Bingley’s ability to “marry for love” was, sadly, based on their income. The woman could only regain direct use of and title to her remaining pre-marital property if she outlived her husband. The Married Woman’s Property Acts of 1870, 82, 84, and 93 gave women rights to their property even within the confines of their marriage.
I did refrain from editorializing here despite my distaste at coverture.
Of course, one can have fun in the notes. Consider the name of Maggie Smalls’s abuser in The Exile—Charlie Watts. My note:
Sorry Stones fans…I needed a “w.”
Then there is my fascination with not necessarily useful information as when referring to Lord Henry Fitzwilliam’s 1907 Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost. My wife’s great-uncle was Art Souter, so I loved the idea of getting him into my book.
Rolls Royce manufactured the chassis and drive train components. Those who purchased an automobile from R-R would then order a body from a coach-maker. An excellent reference on classic Rolls-Royce motorcars is Arthur Souter, The American Rolls-Royce, Mowbray Co., 1976
Finally, when Mary awakens on December 12, 1811, her first day as Miss Bennet, she recalled the dreams she had been having and referenced Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The front end of the note is straightforward, but I did have fun with the last sentence.
Coleridge composed “Kubla Khan: Or, a vision in a dream. A Fragment” in 1796 after dreaming that he had been composing a poem. He awoke and raced to write down all he could recall as his senses returned. Some argue that he had been under the influence of Mrs. Bennet’s favorite nerve restorative, a tincture of morphine known as laudanum.
Thus, I note that I will continue to note!
Links to books mentioned in this column:
The Sailor’s Rest https://mybook.to/SailorsRestPandP
The Maid and The Footman (in Lessers and Betters) mybook.to/LessersandBetters
The Keeper: Mary Bennet’s Extraordinary Journey mybook.to/MPKeeperwardrobe
The Exile: Kitty Bennet and the Belle Époque mybook.to/KittyBennetBelleMP
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Maitland_(British_Army_officer)
[2] Significant events and anniversaries whether royal, national or Abbey related are marked by the ringing of a full peal [at Westminster Abbey]. This comprises a minimum of 5000 different changes (or sequences) and is performed without a break. A peal takes over three hours to complete… from http://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/abbey-bells accessed on 11/12/16.