Tag Archives: Faro’s Daughter

Regency food and characters

fabulous hotel foodRegency food is really interesting and characters’ preferences tell us a lot about them. Their preferences for drink do too, as I tried to show in my earlier blog about what characters (Regency and modern) drank.

But this week, I’m blogging about food in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Sometimes, food in glamorous surroundings, too…

Where Regency food came from…? Meat, fish, game

Mr Darcy and Lizzie Bennet at the danceThere isn’t much detail of food and drink in Pride and Prejudice, but Mrs Bennet does mention preparations being made for dinners to fête Mr Bingley’s return to Netherfield.

“Mrs Nicholls…was going to the butcher’s, she told me, on purpose to order in some meat on Wednesday, and she had got three couple of ducks, just fit to be killed.”

That shows that meat wasn’t instantly available from a butcher’s as it is now. And a hostess knew and accepted that providing meat entailed killing animals. Continue reading

Georgette Heyer: the problem of brothers (for sisters)

False Colours by Georgette Heyer Cover by BarbosaBrothers, in Georgette Heyer’s Georgian and Regency novels, can be a sad trial for their sisters. Not always, but often.

A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about children in Heyer’s novels. That produced some interesting feedback and a really fascinating related blog by Elizabeth Hawksley about children in the nursery.

Elizabeth’s blog made me think about the problem of brothers. Not children, but grown-up brothers. So in this blog, I’m exploring those relationships (with quotations in blue which, sorry, make this blog pretty long).

Male children, primogeniture, the law and more

Back in the Regency, males definitely had it over females. Upper class males could, and did, do a lot of what they liked, even if it was reckless or dangerous. Females were hidebound by rules about what they could and couldn’t do. Mostly couldn’t. Continue reading

Special Licence Marriage — Heyer’s Research Failing?

a special licence marriage?

Signing the Register Edward Blair Leighton

Marriage by special licence plays a very important role in historical romance. Georgette Heyer used it often. And today’s writers of historical romance use it too. Why? Because with banns or a common licence, the couple had to marry in a public church or chapel between the hours of 8 and noon.

Goblin Court typical English village

 

 

Those restrictions would have put paid to many a fictional marriage, like the one in Georgette Heyer’s The Reluctant Widow.

The heroine’s wedding takes place in the middle of the night.
And in a local PUB! Continue reading