Anti-heroines

I blogged a while back about my fondness for imperfect characters. As I wrote, “I’ve always found flawed characters much more interesting than the more conventionally heroic sort. Growing up, Milady de Winter was my favorite character in The Three Musketeers (I thought Constance was boring), I couldn’t understand why Lucie Manette looked twice at Charles Darnay when Sydney Carton was around, I much preferred Mary Crawford to Fanny Price.” Sarah wrote to me recently following up on this, because she’s reading The Three Musketeers and getting to know the fascinating Milady de Winter. Sarah wrote, “I know I tend to prefer heroines who use their ‘feminine wiles’ – or sexuality – to achieve their own way, instead of resorting to the cliched ‘PC’ approach of typically male methods, such as physical violence, and Milady is the perfect example of a strong woman.”

As with so many classics, my first introduction to The Three Musketeers was my mom reading it out loud to me when I was quite small. I remember her describing the book before we read it and saying “It has a fascinating heroine–I mean villainess.” That’s a perfect way to describe Milady, because while she’s definitely an antagonist to d’Artagnan, Athos, Porthos, and Aramis, she’s a compelling, fascinating character.

 

Sisters & Brothers

I had a fun afternoon today seeing a matinee of The Other Boleyn Girl with a friend. I’ve loved Tudor & Elizabethan history every since I watched The Six Wives of Henry VIII and Elizabeth R on tv as a young child (closely followed by a family trip to Britain where we visited Hampton Court, the Tower of London, and so many other locations that featured in both series). I love watching different dramatizations of the era, getting different takes on familiar events, discussing (as my friend and I did over a lunch) what was historically accurate, what was changed, what’s open to interpretation.

 

What if…?

Earlier this week, on the Fog City Divas blog, Allison Brennan had a great post on that question so often asked of writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” Thinking about my own answer, I realized my ideas often involve playing “what if…?” The question might be sparked by research (part of the idea for The Mask of Night came from saying “what if Hortense Bonaparte had secretly come to England in 1820 to see her former lover, now married to an Englishwoman?”). It might be sparked by the plot of a play, movie, opera (operas are a great source of gut-wrenching conflict), tv show, or another novel (though I didn’t realize it at the time, looking back I know that part of the idea for Secrets of a Lady came from watching the Jane Seymour/Anthony Andrew version of The Scarlet Pimpernel and saying “what if Marguerite really were a spy?”). Sometimes the question is sparked by my own characters (part of the idea for Beneath a Silent Moon came from saying “what if there was a girl back in England everyone had expected Charles to marry and thought would make him the perfect wife?”).

 

Speculating over a Series

Last week, I had the fun of finally meeting in person my fellow writer and History Hoydens contributor Lauren Willig. Lauren was in California as part of a book tour for her novel The Seduction of the Crimson Rose. If you haven’t already discovered Lauren’s Pink Carnation books, do so now. They’re a wonderful Napoleonic Wars spy series, filled with adventure, intrigue, romance, playful allusions to The Scarlet Pimpernel, and an equally fun modern-day frame about a contemporary graduate student who is uncovering the history of the Pink Carnation while researching her dissertation in London. I was so excited to have a new book in the series to read, and it was a special treat to get to meet Lauren in person.

 

Friends & Lovers

Last week’s discussion about friendship in novels segued into a discussion of romantic relationships rooted in friendship. Perla said, “As for my favorite friendship, it’s between Claire and Jamie from Outlander. I love the friendship they shared at the beginning of their amazing love story.” Cate brought up Anne and Gilbert in the Anne of Avonlea books and television series. Dorthe and Sarah talked about how Percy and Marguerite’s relationship evolves from Percy worshipping Margot on a pedestal and Margot feeling an almost desperate, possessive love for Percy to, as Dorthe said, “an understanding where she accepts his choices and he accepts the pain he causes her. In a way that kind of love is the most beautiful kind of friendship, I think, because it honours the freedom and the separateness of the two people involved although it also recognizes the deep bond.”

 

The Complications of Friendship

In the comments to last week’s post (and thanks, everyone, for the great discussion!), Cate mentioned that while she had come to have more of an affinity with Mélanie on rereads, “I’m still not sure I would trust her as a friend, but I probably wouldn’t have a choice. I’d find her too interesting not to spend time with her, if she would deign to allow me.”

My first reaction was to be surprised and think “that’s interesting, I’d certainly trust Mélanie as a friend.” Then I re-examined it, because truth to tell it’s a question I’d never really considered. Would I trust her? Probably, because she’s very charming, and I suspect I’d never know what was going on in her head or what she really up to :-). Would I be wise to trust her? More difficult to answer. Mélanie’s very loyal. But as Cate said “She’s loyal, but she, like everyone, has a hierarchy of loyalties and she’s not likely to be changed.” And she can be quite ruthless when she makes up her mind what she needs to do.

 

Unexpected Resonances

One of my favorite holiday activities is going to the movies. I love movies in any case, and it’s particularly fun to go with friends and family in the midst of holiday celebrations, especially with all the movies that open at the end of the year as part of the lead up to the various awards. In and around shopping, wrapping, card writing, and entertaining, I managed to go to quite a few movies in the past few weeks. My favorites were Atonement and Sweeney Todd, which were both quite haunting and wonderful. I blogged about them last week on History Hoydens.

As I mentioned in that blog, watching the opening scene of Sweeney Todd, I was struck by the similarity to the opening scene of Beneath a Silent Moon. For a fleeting moment, I could almost have been watching a movie of my own book (well, we can all dream :-). Sweeney Todd opens with Sweeney returning to London by ship. His views on London are in sharp contrast to those of the man who has rescued him, the idealistic young sailor Anthony. In Sweeney’s words:

There’s a whole in the world like a great black pit
and the vermin of the world inhabit it
and its morals aren’t worth what a pin can spit
and it goes by the name of London.

 

“Fallen” Heroines and Happy Endings

I recently saw an opera I’d never seen before, Puccini’s “La Rondine” (a lovely production at San Francisco Opera with Angela Gheorghiu and Misha Didyk). The story is not an unsual one. Magda, a beauiful worldly woman who is the mistress to a banker, falls in with an ardent, naïve young man. She leaves her glamorous life in Paris and runs off with the young man. She doesn’t succumb to consumption like Violetta in “La Traviata,” but when her young lover proposes and starts talking about taking her to meet his mother and raising children, she decides she’s too damaged to be his wife and leaves him (in a stunning, poignant aria).

Magda is just the sort of heroine I always find myself wanting to have a happy ending. I’ve always thought “fallen women” make some of the most interesting heroines–there’s so much history and potential conflict (not to mention that they often get to wear the best clothes; I noticed that even before I was quite old enough to understand what a “fallen woman” was :-). Rakish heroes often reform and settle down with virtuous young girls. Even if they think their past makes them unfit to touch the hem of their beloved’s gown, the heroines can usually persuade them otherwise (a couple of lovely scenes from Georgette Heyer’s “These Old Shades” and “Venetia” come to mind). But the double standard ensures that the rake’s female counterpart seems doomed to a tragic ending in most stories.

 

Masks and Disguises

Halloween was always one of my favorite holidays growing up, not for the candy but for the chance to dress up as whatever character I chose. I was a medieval lady (complete with steeple hat with veil), Maid Marian, Lady Jane Grey (the year I’d first gone to England), a colonial girl (in 1976). Admiring the imaginative costumes of the kids out trick-or-treating this past week, I thought about the fascination of pretending to be someone else. A wonderful game when you’re a child, that often becomes a more serious game in fiction.

For many of the characters in “Secrets of a Lady” masquerading is second nature. Mélanie’s whole life has been a masquerade for so many years she isn’t sure who she is anymore (“Charles had accused her of lying for so long that she couldn’t know herself anymore, and he’d been more accurate than she cared to admit”). In the course of the book, she and Charles tell different stories and play different parts with the different people they approach for information. One of the people they encounter, Hugo Trevennen, is an actor who still lives his life changing from character to character even in the confines of hte Marshalsea prison. His niece Helen Trevennen, who holds to the key to the mystery of the Carevalo Ring, has changed her identity more than once, just as Mélanie has.

 

Alternate endings

I love thinking about the characters in my books. I love to imagine events in their lives before a book starts and after it concludes (which is why I so love to write series and why it’s so fun to fill in the blanks with the Fraser Correspondence). I like to imagine events in the lives of characters my favorite books by other authors as well (what was it like for Elizabeth to arrive at Pemberley as its mistress? did Venetia and Damerel really go to Rome on their honeymoon and take Aubrey with them? what adventures did Holmes and Russell have in France after the end of ‘The Beekeeper’s Apprentice”?).

Sometimes I find myself going one step farther and imagining what might have happened in my own books or in books I love to read if the story had taken a different turn. I’ve considered the different ways Charles and Mélanie’s marriage would have played out if the truth of Mélanie’s past had come out differently, without the pressure of Colin’s abduction forcing them to work together. I’ve imagined scenarios where Mélanie left England (more like Irina Derevko or Fiona Samson), perhaps faking her death to give Charles a clean start. And then returned for some reason (possibly with Charles about to marry again), with Colin and Jessica confused, Charles deeply ambivalent…