History is Stranger than Fiction by Lauren Willig Author of The Pink Carnation Series and Bonus Giveaway

Historically Obsessed is proud to welcome author Lauren Willig for her first visit to Historically Obsessed. Lauren has a new reprint of "The Secret History of the Pink Carnation" just hit bookstores everywhere yesterday on October 5th 2010. My review will be up shortly and I can say that in store there are all kinds of Lauren giveaways and much much more. Please put your hands together and welcome Lauren Willig to talk a little bit about how history is stranger than fiction. Please take it away Laurel we are all dying to hear what you think. Do not forget to read the whole post there is an extra special treat for the readers at the end.

History Is Stranger Than Fiction by Lauren Willig

History is stranger than fiction.  Recently, I had the fun of seeing select scenes from my first book, The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, transformed from prose into pictures.   Pink Carnation is set in 1803, during Napoleon’s tenure as First Consul, just at the point where Anglo-French relations deteriorating once again into open warfare.  My half-English, half-French heroine is in the famous Yellow Salon of the Tuileries Palace, being presented to Mme Bonaparte, when Bonaparte himself barrels in, interrupting the conversation and knocking her half off her feet.


Kind of over the top, no?  A little burlesqued, even.  I had a moment of alarm on seeing the comic version, wondering what readers might think.  Would it strike them as too absurd?  But that was Napoleon for you.  He really did barge into his wife’s salons, interrupting mid-sentence.  He bolted his food at meals, forcing everyone to eat as quickly as he did, and there are even memorable stories of his ripping—yes, literally ripping—the dresses off women he suspected of wearing embargoed British muslin rather than French linen from St. Quentin.  It gives a whole new meaning to bodice ripper.


One of the best parts of writing historical fiction is getting to stumble across tidbits like these.  History is full of slapstick—like Josephine’s pug dog, Fortune, biting the future Emperor on their wedding night, or King Charles I getting stuck in a window while attempting to escape from Parliamentary custody.  Not so amusing for the players at the time, but pure Monty Python in retrospect.  


One of the difficulties of writing historical fiction is judging when the absurd is too absurd, when truth will come across as falsehood, because, really, who does things like that?  My entire series is premised around the notion of flower-named spies dashing about Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, leaving witty notes on Napoleon’s pillow and thwarting his military maneuvers.  Absurd?  Perhaps.  True?  Absolutely.  There was a veritable bouquet of spies with flower aliases on the prowl in early nineteenth century France, including a Mouron (a Pimpernel), and, my favorite, la Prime-Rose (a pun on primrose), a comely lady spy who, when the occasion called for it, could disguise herself as anything from a courtesan to a young boy.
 

Were there female spies during the Napoleonic Wars?  You betcha.  La Prime-Rose (like my own fictional Pink Carnation) was just one among many.  One of my favorite bizarre but true stories is that of a fifty-year old widow, a Mrs. Arabella Williams, who successfully disguised herself for several years as a teenage cabin boy while she carried information back and forth between England and France.


I could go on and on—and generally do, unless stopped by that glaze-eyed expression people get when you pontificate at them at cocktail parties.  Among my researches, I’ve stumbled across an Indian ruler who liked to strangle courtesans with silk handkerchiefs, a rebellion in Ireland foiled by accidental fireworks, the inner workings of the Hellfire Club, and even some surprising information about that perpetual fan favorite, Miss Jane Austen.  


Some things even I can’t make up….

Thank you Lauren for paying visit and what a cool post and how fun it was to read. I love comic art and I think that is more my thing too when it comes down to art. It is so different to put a face to the character and she what it turns out like. For more on Lauren and her wonderful comic check out her website. Trust me I saw it and man is it cool. Now it is giveaway time,

 Open to US  and Canada it is a beautiful paperback copy!

Rules

For 1 entry leave me a comment with a way to contact you.

For 2 entries follow my blog. If you already do, thanks, and please let me know in the comments. You're eligible for the extra entry as well.

For 3 entries blog or tweet this giveaway to spread the word.

Giveaway will end on October 13rd at midnight.

Good luck to everyone I know one lucky reader is going to be very happy with this one. 

"Nothing ever goes right for Eloise. The day she wears her new suede boots, it rains. When the subway stops short, she's the one thrown into some stranger's lap. And she's had her share of misfortune in the way of love. So, after deciding that romantic heroes must be a thing of the past, Eloise is ready for a fresh start.

Setting off for England, Eloise is determined to finish her dissertation on two spies, the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian. But what she discovers is something historians have missed: the secret history of the Pink Carnation-the most elusive spy of all time. As she works to unmask this obscure spy, Eloise has more and more questions. Like, how did the Pink Carnation save England from Napoleon? What became of the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian? And will Eloise Kelly escape her bad luck and find a living, breathing hero of her own"?

More on Lauren
http://www.laurenwillig.com/Facebook
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How Historical is Homer by Laurel Corona author of Penelope's Daughter

Historically Obsessed is proud to welcome author Laurel Corona. Laurel's new release "Penelope's Daughter" hit bookstores everywhere on October 5th 2010. I promise my review will be up shortly and I can not wait to get into the details of the book and honestly tell you how much I loved it. I am proud to welcome Laurel to talk a little bit about Homer and what it means to be a historical fiction author. Please take it away Laurel we are all dying to hear what you think.

 How Historical is Homer? 

We all think we know what the term “historical fiction” means. According to one of the Wikipedia sites, “Historical fiction is a genre in which the plot is set amidst historical events, or more generally, in which the author uses real events but adds one or more fictional characters or events, or changes the sequence of historical events.”

The Historical Novel society focuses on the author. “To be deemed historical (in our sense), a novel must have been written at least fifty years after the events described, or have been written by someone who was not alive at the time of those events (who therefore approaches them only by research).”


Sounds good.  It has to be an invented story based on historical fact, and “historical” means outside the lifetime of the author—unless we are over fifty, in which case, even without any fantastic time-travel device, we could be characters in our own books.

Ouch!  I feel like perhaps I should go strap on a bustle, although the truth is that when I was officially “historical” I didn’t even own a bra—first because I was too young and then because, well, I just didn’t.  The Sixties, you know.

I think I could make the case that a) Penelope’s Daughter is not a historical novel at all, or b) these definitions don’t really work for some historical fiction. I’d be a bit crazy to argue for the first, so I’m going to make a case for the second. 

There’s a great deal about the past that isn’t really historical, in the sense of documented and/or widely accepted as true. Anyone writing about eras deemed “pre-historic,” i.e. before written records were kept, won’t have a whole lot of concrete facts to work with. This can be a rewarding challenge, as Anita Diamant showed us when she took one biblical reference to Dina and created The Red Tent from it. Like Diamant, we can research a time and a place (what people ate, how they dressed), and infer from our own experience and basic humanity other things that have to be true (childbirth is painful, floods are dangerous).
Historical fiction draws on both research and imagination, each book with its own mix.  Sometimes we have to imagine something from scratch, and sometimes we’re working directly from the pages of our sources.  In the case of Homer’s epics, however, there’s not in much in the way of sources to draw on. We have to question whether the Homeric epics are really historical, as the term is generally used.  Presumably for an event to be historical it has to have happened, and for a person to be historical he or she has to have existed.  There’s nothing in the Iliad or the Odyssey that can undeniably meet those tests.

The reason for this is a strange quirk of Greek history.  In the Mycenaean era rudimentary written records were kept, though they produced no literature. Ironically we know of Linear B, one of the earliest written languages, because when the city of Pylos was sacked and burned (by whom we don’t know) the building housing the clay tablets on which records were kept was turned into a kiln in the conflagration. The tablets were fired, allowing them to survive until they could be discovered in modern times.  Here’s the quirk: after this sacking and burning (which took place all over the Peloponnese and Crete) the people of the region became illiterate.  It’s rare for a culture to lose literacy altogether, but that’s what happened. Though scholars argue about why, no one knows for sure.

Pylos, Mycenae, and the other great centers of pre-Greek culture fell between 1300 and 1200 BCE.  Homer came on the scene roughly 800 BCE, so 4 to 5 centuries elapsed before Greece became literate enough again to produce written records of what its bards sang.  But sing they did, and over those centuries, the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey came into the culture. Homer (and we don’t know if there really was a Homer) didn’t make up these stories.  He or someone else (she?)wrote down what bards had always sung about, stories people already knew by heart.

"Helen of Troy by Evelyn de Morgan (1898, London); Helen admiringly displays a lock of her hair, as she gazes into a mirror decorated with the nude Aphrodite".

Stories of heroes. Stories of great deeds.  Are they true? Was there an Agamemnon?  Was there a Helen?  Was there a war with Troy, and if so, why was it fought? We can speculate, but we don’t know for certain. The entire “Age of Heroes” would have happened during this period of illiteracy, what are called “the Greek Dark Ages.”

What’s been written about the city-state of Athens, or “Classical Greece,” as it is often called, fills libraries. There’s less about Mycenae, but still some good and accessible scholarship. The problem in writing Penelope’s Daughter


I took back to the library all the books about women in classical Greek society because they really weren’t relevant. I thought about what might survive of a culture that had been overrun and decided to use those speculations as the foundation for the novel. That and the Odyssey itself. As a historical novelist, I don’t imagine I’ll ever have it so easy again. What I wrote was consistent with the scholarship I did uncover, but Homer was my rock, my primary primary source.

Is there anything to the legends he relates? It’s well documented that literacy and memory have an inverse relationship.  Those who can’t write things down have richer and more accurate memories. In situations where oral histories can be compared to contemporaneous written ones (as, for example, when the Arabs traded with the east coast of Africa centuries ago), oral historians are generally found to be amazingly accurate. Why should the early Greek culture be different?

My guess is that these stories are based in fact, and that probably many of the characters are real.  Over the centuries the “fish story” effect kicked in, and by the time the stories were written down, everything and everyone had gotten bigger--stronger, wilier, braver, and more beautiful. Was there a Penelope?  I think there probably was.  Did she have a daughter?  I obviously think so!

Thank you Laurel for the wonderful visit and guest post. It is nice to know what the definition is of a HF writer. Most importantly thank you for bringing the softer side of ancient Greece to a whole new light for me. 

For more on Laurel
http://www.laurelcorona.com/
http://sandiegowritingwomen.blogspot.com/
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Book Review: THE JEWEL OF ST. PETERSBURG by Kate Furnivall

Surprise on me, initially I turned this one down for review because I was in review overload at the moment. After I looked up Kate Furnivall on my usual book sites I quickly recanted my decision.  I can confirm Kate Furnivall is a rising star in historical fiction, now I just need to find the time to fit in  “The Russian Concubine”



Revolutionary Russia was a scary, way scary time period. It is right up there with The French Revolution in my mind. In other words no one was safe and life was filled with constant threats. Kate’s leading lady Valentina was beautiful, kind, and exquisitely talented at playing the piano with her soul. She felt the music because it was part of who she was. Tragedy struck the family home when the revolutionary group the Bolsheviks set off a bomb that left Valentina’s little sister Katya paralyzed. What was shocking is that they would pick on her family like that but her father was part of the Tsar’s group and was a Baron. One positive that came out of such a negative was the attack inspired Valentina to become a dedicated nurse.


Valentina first laid eyes on the hot “Viking” Jens Friis during a private piano performance for the Tsar. Jens was a Danish engineer that came to Russia to work for the Tsar on building Russia a whole underground sewer system. Since Russia never had anything like the sewers before you can only imagine the daily struggles Jens faced. His mission was for the greater good of the people. Valentina and Jens shared that special aspect where at the core they were givers, lovers of people, and the kind of people that would give you the shirt off their back if you needed it.


In the time when the Russian people could not be forced any lower, the political unrest lead to anger among the working class. The people had every right to be angry; they had no clean water, no job safety, and bad politics leading them down an even worse path than before. Sadly the people had eventually lost all hope of the future and had begun to openly rebel. The unrest in Russia came to its zenith when Valentina and Jens were just starting to find their way in life. It became clear that home was not safe and Jens’ job was not safe either because it was the working class who dug out the new sewer tunnels. It was made with the sweat and blood of the working class. Sadly not all who went to work in the morning came back home at the end of the day. Dying at work was a reality, starving was more than likely, and when the hope for the future died it was replaced with anger for the “privileged” people like Jens and Valentina. Russia demanded change, it needed change but Jens and Valentina would become swept up with the blood storm of a country in the middle of a revolution.


5/5 what I enjoyed most about this book was Valentina. Not because she was beautiful or because she played the piano but that she genuinely cared about people. She loved her sister beyond words and did everything she could to care for her not just physically but spiritually also. It is one thing to love a sister but to give that kind of love to a stranger is another thing that Valentina did with out hesitation or thought. The other aspect I most enjoyed was Kate’s impeccable gift of relaying the specific details. Kate gives the readers a real treat; you live and breathe Russia through Valentina. Taking in the smallest details like the smell of the city, smoke billowing off a shotgun, the much humanized staff that cared for Valentina’s home, Kate even covered the filth and garbage in the streets. Historical fiction does not get much better than this. The only thing that would even come close is actually teleporting back into time to Revolutionary Russia. Besides this book has the best ending I have read in a long time.

PG-13 For mild violence and language
FTC- This book was sent to me by the publisher

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The Early Edition of Mailbox Mondays

Regency Buck  by Georgette Heyer, wish granted on Paperbackswap.com

"Miss Judith Taverner and her brother travel to London to meet their guardian, Julian St. John Audley, Lord Worth, expecting an elderly gentleman. To their surprise and utter disgust, their guardian is not much older than they are, and is determined to thwart all their interests, hoping to return them to the country until they reach majority and his job is done.

But Miss Taverner begins to move in the highest circles of society and Lord Worth can't do a thing about it ...

While Heyer's sparkling Regency romances usually depicted the secondary nobility, with an occasional Duke, in Regency Buck, Heyer mixes her fictional characters with real-life personages of the highest of the haut ton-the circle of the Prince Regent and his brothers (all huge men with huge appetites), and Beau Brummell, the famous dandy who single-handedly set the fashions for male attire and manners".

The Russian Concubine  by Kate Furnival, used one reserve credit on "pbs" because I had to have this one.

"A sweeping novel set in war-torn 1928 China, with a star-crossed love story at its center.

In a city full of thieves and Communists, danger and death, spirited young Lydia Ivanova has lived a hard life. Always looking over her shoulder, the sixteen-year-old must steal to feed herself and her mother, Valentina, who numbered among the Russian elite until Bolsheviks murdered most of them, including her husband. As exiles, Lydia and Valentina have learned to survive in a foreign land.

Often, Lydia steals away to meet with the handsome young freedom fighter Chang An Lo. But they face danger: Chiang Kai Shek's troops are headed toward Junchow to kill Reds like Chang, who has in his
possession the jewels of a tsarina, meant as a gift for the despot's wife. The young pair's all-consuming love can only bring shame and peril upon them, from both sides. Those in power will do anything to quell it. But Lydia and Chang are powerless to end it".