Why Regency Romance rocks!
I blame my Regency romance career on Jane Austen and Georgette Heyer. Surely it's their fault that I've always found early nineteenth century Britain so interesting.
The Regency is distant enough to be glamorous, but recent enough so that the people speak to us in voices we understand. It was a period of social ferment and the beginning of major reforms. It was the Age of the Common Man-which, after all, is what most of us are descended from, even though the Regency romance fantasy is of titles, grand mansions, and really lovely clothes.
While I've set books all the way from Arthurian legend to modern times, the vast majority take place during the Regency. Fallen Angel (published in the US as Thunder and Roses) is the first of my Fallen Angels series. (It's a seven book trilogy. Three books just seemed so skimpy!)
While my Fallen Angels books have their share of balls and Cinderella makeovers, the stories also explore the world beyond London. The series began when my editor called to say that the publisher was launching a new historical romance imprint, they wanted me to write a book for the launch, and she needed a storyline and a title in-urp!-twenty four hours.
Luckily, the Muse usually produces under pressure, and she didn't fail me this time. I'd just come off writing a trilogy of research-intensive books set mostly in Asia, so I was ready to return to Regency Britain, where I knew my way around. I placed Fallen Angel in Wales because when I lived in Oxford some years ago, I had friends in Carmarthen and visited the beautiful Welsh countryside a number of times.
Wales led to miners, and from there to Methodism, which was an important aspect of Welsh life. My research into early Methodism was fascinating as I learned how Methodists ministered to working people who were sometimes overlooked by the established church. The Methodist commitment to teaching and social service intrigued me and helped shape my heroine, Clare Morgan is the daughter of a Methodist minister and the a schoolteacher in her Welsh village.
My hero was more of a traditional charming rogue, but I also gave him a characteristic I've explored over and over: a mixed ethnic heritage. Nicholas Davies had a Gypsy mother who sold the boy to the stern Earl of Aberdare, who despised his mixed blood grandson, but who had no other heir.
I find historical characters of mixed heritage interesting because of the challenges they face in finding their place in the world. At the same time, mixed blood is a good metaphor for the sense of being an outsider that just about everyone experiences at some time. (Particularly in adolescence!)
Since I'm an American, lords and ladies are exotic and fun to write about. But in the real world, people who are raised with too much wealth and privilege can have a rather obnoxious arrogance. Hence, my tendency to torture my heroes in various psychological ways. I figure that a little suffering makes them more sensitive to others and hence better hero material. Horrible grandfathers, being orphaned early, traitorous wives-it's all grist for the writerly mill.
The foundation of the Fallen Angels series was four men of aristocratic birth who bonded at Eton. Since none of them had satisfactory families of their own, they created a family of friends. A man who can be a good and loyal friend can also be a good and loyal husband, and the various characters wander in and out of each other's story.
One of the background themes of this series is the Napoleonic wars. I've always been interested in British military history of the period, and intrigued by the parallels to World War II, since in both cases, Britain stood alone against a Continental monster.
Hence, many of my characters are spies or soldiers, with one heroine who "followed the drum" as an officer's wife. There is a Waterloo book later in the series, two about veterans adjusting to civilian life. By the last book, the wars are in the past.
But while the Fallen Angels books have their share of history and themes, at heart, they are all romances. At the center of each are two complicated people who struggle through fears and challenges to find their way to each other.
In Fallen Angel, Clare confronts Nicholas because her village is in trouble, and he's the absentee owner who can make a difference. All he wants to do is drive away this moralizing prig, so he offers a bargain: his help in return for her behaving in a way that will ruin her reputation. He assumes that of course she'll refuse. But even the well-behaved daughters of ministers can have a surprising temper...
I think of Dancing on the Wind as my "sneaky man meets a sneakier woman" book. The hero is a spymaster, the heroine is a woman of ever-shifting identities, and "dancing on the wind" is an old euphemism for being hanged.
The third book in the series sends an arrogant duke to do some discreet spying in the post-Waterloo Paris Peace conferences, and there he encounters a betraying woman who had been the one love of his life. But maybe the past isn't as Rafe remembers, and Margot has her own reasons to feel betrayed...
And so the Fallen Angels series go. Granted, it isn't easy to be one of my protagonists, but they all thank me in the end. Really.