Fresh Fiction Blog | Sherry Thomas | What You Can Learn From Reading and Writing Historical Novels

My favorite way to learn history is to come across it via fiction. Of course, since my favorite kind of history is not the chronicle of kings and queens, but everyday history--what people ate, how they lived, what they did to get away from it all--it is these details and quirks of history that stay with me. For example, in Laura Kinsale’s FOR MY LADY’S HEART--for my money, one of the best medieval romances ever written--the hero is a knight, the heroine is far above him in worldly stature: she is a princess. On the run from danger, it is the two of them against the world. One scene in the book has her giving him an orange and a stick of violet-scented sugar that made up part of her meal. And this is a paragraph from that scene:

He sucked the fruit, allowing the rich bitter juice to run on his tongue. He’d had oranges in Aquitaine a few times, at feasts and Christmas--but to eat one every day as she did was something utterly beyond his experience. And the penidia: he’d never tasted white sugar but once, a score and more Christmas gone, a child at the high board with his father and mother.

For a thirty-year-old man from a good family to have had sugar but twice in his life--oney was the far commoner sweetener for the medieval age--paints a vivid picture not only of the rarity of sugar, but just how differently and extravagantly the aristocracy lived. I’m going to borrow from Laura Kinsale again--the lady is just so skillful at weaving historic details into her narrative, you never feel that she is info-dumping or lecturing, but she reconstructs her eras beautifully and completely. This time the book is THE SHADOW AND THE STAR, set in 1887, during Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee celebration. The heroine, who joins the hero’s household as his secretary, reads newspaper articles on the Jubilee to him and a gathering of servants.

While Leda had been reading, at the far end of the conservatory the kitchen staff had set a table with a festive array of light luncheon food, but everyone was still gathered around her with intent faces. She grew daring, and concluded her reading with a droll advertisement for the Patented Patriotic Bustle, which was guaranteed to play "God Save the Queen" whenever the wearer sat down. The scullery maids found that impossibly funny, especially after Sheppard solemnly pointed out what an exhausting device it must be, since every good Englishman must immediately stand up upon hearing the tune. Even the French chef laughed.

I laughed too, and always remembered it. And not only for the exoticness of the advertisement. Let’s face it, sure we don’t wear bustles anymore, and we don’t want our spanx to sing, but is the Patented Patriotic Bustle all that different from some of the wilder and wackier products of our time? This made me feel an unexpected connection to the Victorians. For all that we usually think of them as staid and rule-bound, they were living in a wild and wacky world too. In my own books, I try to incorporate historical tidbits that strike me as memorable, usually things that are markedly different from our current era. In researching for DELICIOUS, which features a heroine who is a cook, I loved learning about the servants’ ball. In the nineteenth century, a private establishment of any size often had some forty servants--the bigger aristocratic households had more than a hundred--and the servants too had their rituals and amusements, with the servants’ ball being the event in their annual calendar.

It can be quite an elaborate affair, with a big buffet laid out, and everyone in their Sunday best. The housekeeper and the butler lead the maids and the menservants, respectively, in a grand promenade to open the ball. And then the lord of the manor dances with the housekeeper, the lady of the house with the butler--probably the only time of the year when masters and servants mingle socially. During the writing of my new release, HIS AT NIGHT, while researching country houses, I was enthralled by the tremendous gardens that were part and parcel of these ancestral piles. The flower gardens were actually only a small part of the whole. Remember how many servants such a manor entailed? They all had to be fed three times a day. All the fruits and vegetables in their diet--and that of the family’s--came from the estate’s own gardens. But not only that, the Victorian gardeners on these great estates elevated horticulture to an art form. They produced strawberries at Christmas and pineapples in January. They had grape vines growing right at the dinner table, so that a guest at the table had but to reach out to pluck a ripe grape. Imagine that.

So of course I mentioned it in passing in HIS AT NIGHT, just because it is so darn interesting.

What fun and unexpected things have you learned from reading historical romances? Or romances in general? Please let me know. I will be giving away a copy of HIS AT NIGHT to a commenter.

Sherry Thomas’s new book, HIS AT NIGHT, is a Romantic Times Top Pick.

Love is hottest in the darkness before dawn...

Elissande Edgerton is a desperate woman, a virtual prisoner in the home of her tyrannical uncle. Only through marriage can she claim the freedom she craves. But how to catch the perfect man?

Lord Vere is used to baiting irresistible traps. As a secret agent for the government, he’s tracked down some of the most devious criminals in London, all the while maintaining his cover as one of Society’s most harmless—and idiotic—bachelors. But nothing can prepare him for the scandal of being ensnared by Elissande.

Forced into a marriage of convenience, Elissande and Vere are each about to discover they’re not the only one with a hidden agenda. With seduction their only weapon against each other—and a dark secret from the past endangering both their lives—can they learn to trust each other even as they surrender to a passion that won’t be denied?

You can learn more about HIS AT NIGHT and Sherry’s other books at her website.

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