Everyone recognizes the line.  Not everyone recognizes why Wellington said it, or to whom.  It was a response to a letter Wellington received from Harriette Wilson, arguably the premier courtesan of her day. Unlike, say, Emma Hamilton, who you might call a serial courtesan, Harriette Wilson was the real deal; even when she was a man’s mistress that didn’t keep her from taking other clients.  She was one of those women who, despite a lack of conventional beauty, had so much charm, sex appeal, and chutzpah that mere looks didn’t much matter.

There are two versions of the “publish and be damned” story.  In one, Wilson was writing her memoirs, Wellington got word of the fact that he featured in them and tried to find a way to stop her publishing.  When he found out he couldn’t, Wellington petulantly uttered the famed phrase.  In the other version, Wilson, retired from prostitution and deeply in debt, wrote her memoirs specifically so that she could extort money from former lovers, and Wellington, refusing to pay, told her to go to Hell.  The first version redounds somewhat to Wilson’s credit; the second version to Wellington’s.

Wilson was one of fifteen children of a Swiss watchmaker; she was fifteen when she became the mistress of William, Lord Craven.  Later lovers (aside from Wellington) included the Prince of Wales and any number of peers and wealthy men.  She lived well, and was passing famous, but most of the men she got involved with renegged on promises of financial support.  Once the bloom was off the romance the men didn’t stay long–in fact, several of Harriette’s lovers transferred their interest to the three of her sisters who also became courtesans.  There was not much loyalty to the courtesan one slept with, so why would the courtesans feel loyalty to their clients?

Harriette retired when she was in her mid-30s–like football, prostitution is a game for younger people.  Like most of her peers she did not manage her money particularly well, and within a few years found herself in need of cash.  ”Having no other power or public voice, the betrayed woman reaches for her pen,” Wilson wrote in her memoirs. Once the memoirs were done, she reached for her pen again and wrote letters to virtually every man she named, offering to redact his name for the low bargain price of £200. Famously, Wellington refused to pay up, so the memoirs included this damning tidbit:

“My own Wellington, who has sighed over me by the hour, talked of my wonderful beauty, ran after me . . . only for a single smile from his beautiful Harriette. Did he not kneel? And was I not the object of his first, his most ardent wishes, on his arrival from Spain? Only it was such a pity that Argyle got to my house first. . . .my tender swain Wellington stood in the gutter at two in the morning, pouring forth his amorous wishes in the pouring rain, in strains replete with heartrending grief.”

Was the Hero of Waterloo humiliated? Wilson certainly exacted her revenge. Enough other, um, former clients paid her so that her immediate money problems were solved, but her publisher, John Joseph Stockdale, went to prison for extortion.

Wilson is an interesting character: an autodidact, a fashionista, a woman with the same sort of fame that a pop star or Real Housewife has now–shortlived but potent.  If there was someone she hadn’t slept with but thought could be useful to her, she would write one of her famous “letters of invitation.”  But she was so well known and so sought after that there were not too many men worth sleeping with left to invite.

After the Memoirs were published, Wilson turned to writing poetry and novels.  The fact that we don’t number her among the minor female novelists of the 19th century suggests that she was not particularly good with either.  Her greatest gift seems to have been her charisma, the charm that made her briefly a superstar.

At the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, Plus One Press is holding a joint launch party for The Sleeping Partner and Tales from the House Band (a Plus One music-themed anthology in which I have a story).  Should you happen to be in the neighborhood, it’s on Saturday, October 29, at 3pm.

And then, on November 13, Borderlands Books in San Francisco is hosting the Norcal launch of the two books from 3-5pm (there will be cake.  Also, perhaps, singing.  And certainly reading).  Again, if you’re in the neighborhood, do please come!

This is the first time I’ve had a launch party.  I don’t mean that to sound pathetic: my first five books were published as part of a 4-book-a-month line of Regencies, and there was no publicity at all.  A friend and co-worker of mine who did PR for the programs I ran got me an interview with the Boston Globe, but other than that, the books went out, got sold, and that was the end of it. The publishers I’ve had since then have done more than that–reviews, arranged interviews and the odd reading, things like that.  But this is my first launch party, and I’m pretty chuffed.

Plus, Tor (the publishers of the first two of Miss Tolerance’s adventures) have just told me they intend to do Point of Honour and Petty Treason as e-books (along with The Stone War, my dark urban fantasy novel–that’s right, my imagination contains multitudes).

So October is shaping up to be a pretty nice month.  Hope yours is as good!

I have a fainting disorder.  Doesn’t that sound Victorian and elegant?  It isn’t.

“Run mad as often as you choose, but do not faint!”  – That’s Jane Austen, from Love and Friendship.  As usual, Miss Austen knows what she’s talking about.

Swooning–fainting–was not in vogue during the Regency, at least not the way it was during Victoria’s era, when the swoon was so much a part of society life that there were fainting couches and fainting rooms:

“We must have two dressing-rooms in the third story, one for the gentlemen, one for the ladies–and a little fainting-room besides; the small east room will do for that–we can put in it the easy-chair, with the white batiste cover I brought over from the city, with a pitcher of iced-water, and restoratives, all ready. It is always best, Mrs. Bibbs, to have a pretty little fainting-room prepared beforehand–it makes the thing more complete.” — Susan Fenimore Cooper, Elinor Wyllys

Isn’t that lovely?

Fainting, aka syncope, is a brief loss of consciousness and “postural tone.” In other words: you pass out and fall over. It’s caused by a sudden lowering of blood pressure, and concomitant lack of blood and oxygen to the brain. Not long enough or profound enough to cause damage, just enough to…well, make you faint. In some cases syncope is caused by heart problems or other underlying physical ailment; but sometimes it’s something simpler. The Victorian women who required dedicated couches and rooms to faint in? Likely way too tightly corseted. Having recently built and been laced into a corset, I can tell you that it’s unlikely that Regency corsets caused this sort of problem: the cinching doesn’t feature the waist; it’s designed to push the breasts up. The Victorians, with their fondness for 19″ waists, were more likely to fall over from tight lacing.

You don’t have to lace to fall over, of course. I generally don’t, and yet I have a clinical diagnosis of vaso-vagal syncope. Put simply, sometimes my body over-reacts to a harmless stimulus (a momentary stomach cramp, for example) by going into red alert and reducing blood flow to everything but the core systems; the blood flow to my brain slows wait down, and I fall over. What’s it like to faint? There is nothing delicate and ladylike about it. If you’re smart (which I have finally learned to be) you get down low when you start feeling dizzy; if you don’t you can fall flat on your face. I did this once; it had some unfortunate dental side effects. Crumpling gracefully to the ground requires a lot more “postural tone” than you’re likely to have, and most of that is spent fighting the inevitable. Bonks on the head, the chin, the nose, etc. are likely. As for the faint itself, visually everything contracts and gets fuzzy and gray, like monotone tunnel vision that swallows the world. And there’s a ringing in the ears that gets higher pitched as one gets less conscious.

This is all in a matter of seconds.

Coming out of a faint is different depending on how deep a faint it is. Once I found myself on the floor and thought, for a moment, that I was in bed and was waking from a sound sleep. Other times I’m aware, somehow, that I’ve fainted and that I have to get up and get going, that I can’t stay where I am. The first thing I’m really aware of is that ringing in my ears (I fainted in gym class in high school once and came to with the sound of 35 teen aged girls squealing “what happened! what happened!” sounding like a flock of soprano gulls). Then the sight comes back. Finally, the gross motor tone comes back, and you lumber to your feet and give profuse thanks and apologies to the people around you who have been totally freaked out by your falling over.

I have fainted at the top of the up escalator at an NYC department store; in the ladies’ room of a London cinema; in the coffee shop where I sometimes write; in gym class; on the street a few times; and in a doctor’s office (that was convenient).  None are ideal.  It would be much nicer to have a convenient couch to swoon onto. Preferably with a fainting-room attendant there with a fan and a vinaigrette. Or a nice military man with mustachios to catch me as I slouch gracefully to the ground…

However: in the first of the two I read, somewhere in the first third of the book, the hero casually drops the word “libido.” Using it in way that distinctly evoked psychology.  Which almost made me drop the book.  

Libido: Psychoanalysis (fr. Latin libido: desire, lust) Psychic drive or energy, particularly that associated with the sexual instinct.

That’s the OED, which gives the first English language use in 1909.  But clearly the word libido would have been known to a man who had studied Latin, which a well-educated peer of the realm in 1812 is likely to have done. The problem is with modern reader: I see libido and I think Freud, and it drops me out of the story.  And that’s a problem for the writer.

I swear that I have seen a usage of the word dude dating from 1829, although the OED places it in 1883, with New York City as its point of origin.  An novelist working in the 1890s could use it, but would it be wise?  I mean, really: the word conjures up surfers, board shorts, Keanu Reeves.  So not what I want to imagine when thinking of Diamond Jim Brady or Lilly Langtry.  So nix the period-correct but unfortunately-evocative dude.

The English language is one of my favorite playgrounds; like many of my colleagues, I find it easy to get lost in the OED for an hour or three, just discovering new words.  The right word can set the stage, establish mood, character, all that stuff.  The wrong word–even if historically correct–can blow your scene out of the water.  Again, per the OED, O.K. can earliest be cited in 1839 (as a shortening of all correct or orl korrect–oh, orthography, how I love you!).  Charlotte Brontë could conceivably have used it–it was American slang, so it’s not likely, but they are contemporaneous.  But throwing an Okay into Jane Eyre–let alone into your Tudor-era novel–doesn’t fly, not even if you rationalize it as “well, it’s what they would have said, and aye sounds too quaint.”  That’s a slippery slope: a friend swears that she read a novel set in medieval England where the heroine spoke of actualizing her personhood, but I’m hoping she made that up.

Vocabulary is hard for the historical writer–and not only because you want the mot juste.  I want to use the vocabulary that was current in the period. I want to not use vocabulary that wasn’t in use.  And I want to avoid using period-correct language that means something different now than it did then.  Like contact.  Or nice.

The OED has a columns-long citation for nice:

• in 1290 nice meant foolish or senseless, but it also meant lascivious, wanton, bawdy.  A “nyce minstral” was not a pleasant, kind musician, he was a ribald one.
• by the 1500s nice meant fastidious, dainty, scrupulous.  A “nice sense of dress” meant you were fussy about your appearance.
• in the 1700s nice was beginning to mean agreeable or capable of causing pleasure or delight–we’re getting closer to the modern sense of the word, but still not there yet.
• by 1830 nice is kind and considerate; if you do something in the nicest possible way, you’re being thoughtful, not picky.

Jane Austen noted, in Northanger Abbey, the shift in meaning of nice (with a little bit of a jab at her pedantic hero, Henry Tilney);

“But now really, do not you think Udolpho the nicest book in the world?”

“The nicest — by which I suppose you mean the neatest. That must depend upon the binding.”

“Henry,” said Miss Tilney, “you are very impertinent. Miss Morland, he is treating you exactly as he does his sister. He is forever finding fault with me, for some incorrectness of language, and now he is taking the same liberty with you. The word `nicest,’ as you used it, did not suit him; and you had better change it as soon as you can, or we shall be overpowered with Johnson and Blair all the rest of the way.”

“I am sure,” cried Catherine, “I did not mean to say anything wrong; but it is a nice book, and why should not I call it so?”

“Very true,” said Henry, “and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! It is a very nice word indeed! — It does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement; — people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.”

“While, in fact,” cried his sister, “it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise.”

What it comes down to, I suppose, is: When writing historical fiction you must be nice in your choice of words.  (Take that as you will.)

Remember that coat I made?  And the dress?  And the corset?  And the bonnet?

Last weekend I got to wear them all as the model for the cover of The Sleeping Partner, the new Sarah Tolerance book.  I have never been so intimately involved in a book’s cover before; it’s gratified to have my opinion solicited at every turn, but a little unsettling, too: you don’t get to complain about the cover if you’re this involved!  Still, I trust my new publisher enough so that, at this point, I am merely eager to see what they produce.

The idea of the image is to evoke the time and place (hence the coat) and something of Sarah Tolerance’s separateness from the various layers of society through which she moves–and her readiness for trouble.  Attending the photo shoot were the publisher, Nic Grabien; his wife and Plus One Press author Deborah Grabien, and the photographer, Annaliese Moyer.  Annaliese does a lot of live music photo shoots, rock and roll musicians, concerts and so forth, so this is a little off the beaten path for her. But she dived in with gusto (and many lights and bits of esoteric equipment).

We shot the photo in different ways: hair up, hair down; bonnet on, bonnet off, sword at the ready, dagger in hand, table with stuff on it, no table at all, photo lights, natural light.  We were shooting for about two hours, and I have no idea how many shots Annaliese took, but every now and then I’d hear a satisfied “Hmmmm” from behind me.

What I learned was: 1) modeling is not glamorous; it’s work.  2) wearing a properly laced corset makes standing in one place somewhat easier over time. 3) the first breath after you take off the corset is really deep and delicious.

I can’t wait to see my cover.  Watch this space.

Sake Dean Mahomed, Shampooing Surgeon to George IV and William IV

History is made up of stories.  About people.  Often about people behaving miserably, or heroically, or foolishly; people thinking they were smarter than they were, people who wanted to be important, people who were unexpectedly kind or cruel.  The tricky thing about history is that it tends to belong to the people who wrote it, or to the people who got the best press or yelled the loudest or wrote the best version.

I once almost got into a fight with a Beefeater in the Tower of London when I dared suggest that Shakespeare might have been wrong about Richard III killing off his nephews.  Shakespeare’s version of the story has become enshrined as something “everybody knows.”  And “everybody knows” is almost always a problem if you want to get something right.

I was thinking about this because I’m reading Black London, a terrific and fascinating book by Gretchen Gerzina about the history of Africans in England.  Early in the book Gerzina tells of going into a bookstore looking for material about people of color in London.  The saleswoman told her, with a touch of asperity, that everyone knew that there were no blacks in England prior to the end of WW II.  

In fact, there were so many blacks in England during the reign of Elizabeth I that she issued an edict ordering them to leave the country (it was mostly ignored).  And slavery, which we in America tend to think of as our own “peculiar institution,” was legal in England until as late as 1772.  Or rather, there were African slaves in England–most of them domestics–because there was no specific law against slavery.

What changed? A slave named James Somersett, brought by his owner to England from the Massachusetts colony, was beaten and left to die by his owner, Charles Stewart.  Instead, he was rescued, taken to the hospital, and when he was well, apprenticed as a free man.  By chance, a year or so later, Stewart saw his erstwhile slave, hale and productive, and demanded that the man be returned to him. A huge legal battle ensued, with public opinion vocally divided. The judiciary was forced to make case law, finding that, while colonial laws might explicitly permit slavery, there was no Parliamentary act or common law that made slavery in England legal, and that it was therefore illegal.

Somersett was freed, as were the 10,000 or so African slaves in England. The slave trade continued, making port cities like Bristol and Plymouth into centers of commerce;  slavery in the British colonies flourished. But the abolitionist movement, stirred to life by the Somersett case, struggled against economic interests, and in 1807 the slave trade was abolished. It took almost thirty more years (1834) for the institution itself to be banned throughout the Empire.

All this is contemporary, give or take, to Miss Tolerance’s London. She would be familiar with William Wilberforce’s Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and the discourse surrounding the trade itself. The mystery writer in me says that an economic endeavor such as the slave trade would not necessarily cease with the passage of a law; I’m not sure what I’m thinking in terms of plot; only that I’m thinking.

What about Miss Tolerance herself? Would she have encountered people of color? Had she remained Sarah Brereton, daughter of the gentry, it’s possible she might not. But living in London–and moving through pretty much every level of society–I should think she’d have encountered Africans (and Asians and Indians). How would she deal with them? Honestly? Miss Tolerance is a woman of her time and place and upbringing. She’s not temperamentally a radical. But she is a fairminded, fairly open-minded person who understands, better than most, that life is more than the limited world she was raised to inhabit. How a person handles encountering The Other says a lot about her; and people, more than abstract arguments, have always been most persuasive for Miss Tolerance. I don’t see her becoming an abolitionist, any more than I see her becoming a feminist (a term I think would baffle her). I do see her attempting to treat fairly with people, whatever her upbringing (or theirs).

Suddenly I’ve got lots and lots of research cut out for me, because I don’t want to go with what Everybody Knows.  If you don’t hear from me for a while, look for me at the library, or buried under the internet somewhere.

*the picture above is of a Bengali entrepreneur who introduced the word “shampoo”–meaning head massage–to the English language.  He had a spa–Mahomed’s Steam and Vapour Sea Water Medicated Baths–which combined the benefits of a Turkish bath with massage.  Sounds great.

I wouldn’t look good in it, but really, who cares?  It’s gorgeous.  Note the ribbon ties that make it a bonnet.

Anyway: this week I made a bonnet.  Yup.  As with all my recent excursions into Regency clothing, I suspect the next time I do this I will do a better job.  But it’s a start.

I found a tutorial on making a simple soft-poke Regency bonnet and pretty much followed it, except that I could not find a straw hat to use as a base.  The best I could find was this:

This will henceforth be referred to as The World’s Ugliest Plastic Hat.  My first task, then, was to remove the ruffle on the brim and lop the hat roughly in half:

Next, I bound the edge of the cut, because this stuff will unravel if you look at it sideways:Because TWUH is made of plastic, not straw, I wanted to cover the brim so the Ugly would not be as easily noted.  Because this is Miss Tolerance, who prefers, for business purposes at least, to make her clothes as severe and respectable as possible, I went with a shade of slate blue slightly darker than the dress I made: 

This, if I say so myself, was a big pain in the neck, but once the brim was covered and pinned into place, I started to line the bonnet, again because TWUH’s interior is no lovelier than its exterior.  So I sewed a ruffle onto a piece of light-weight gray “satin” and started pinning that to the underside.  My thinking here was that once pinned, a single set of stitches would attach both the brim covering and the lining, and Lo, it worked.  I love it when it works.

  Here is the finished, gathered lining.  It might have worked better with more fabric or a lighter fabric; next time I’ll know.

Now came the tricky part (so tricky that I forgot to take photos): putting on the capote, or soft crown.  I folded a piece of soft gray lining fabric in half widthwise, sewed it into a tube, folded it in half lengthwise, and gathered it into a soft rounded cone.  (This sounds more confusing than it is…the directions in the tutorial weren’t much easier to parse, I’m afraid.  You kind of had to be there. )

Stitching the crown in place was probably the most difficult sewing of the night, because I had to make sure I caught all the fabric, and the plastic of TWUH was thick and annoying to work with.  I also basted down the upper edge of the brim cover (which caught the lower-edge of the lining inside.  I like it when work does double duty).  . The ribbon is pinned in place to hide the unsightly join.

With the ribbon in place, I basted it to the hat–and to the back of the capote where there was no hat.  A second bit of ribbon in the back covered the raw edge of the capote fabric.  And here, for all its flaws, is my new bonnet:

Next time I will not be in such a hurry, and I will get the proper materials.  I might even get a real pattern.  When I am seized by inspiration it’s really hard not to just dive right in.

Speaking of which, I really should get back to actually writing stuff….

The why is both simple and complex: particularly if you are in the decedent’s family, mourning is meant to indicate loss.  Today, when many people wear all black as a fashion statement, that doesn’t work so well except at a funeral.  But you wear mourning, as much as anything else, as a useful social cue: it shows to the people around the mourner that jokes or thoughtless comments are not appropriate.  Mourning could also flag where the mourners were in the grieving process.  Which is where it started getting complex.

There were certainly rules dictating mourning in Sarah Tolerance’s time, although these rules became infinitely more complex in Victoria’s time–in part, I suspect, because it became a profit center (one manufacturer of funeral crape–a soft, matte-black silk much used for veils, caps, and dresses–went under when mourning customs liberalized in the 20th century).  And of course, how you mourned depended on your social class, and your relation to the deceased.  While the fashion magazines of the time are full of mourning and half-mourning designs, only the very wealthy had a new mourning wardrobe made up.  More often one might make, or have made, one garment, and take apart another garment or two, dye them black, and sew them back together.  Suitable fabrics were wool, bombazine (a wool/silk blend), crape, black-dyed muslin; widows were not supposed to wear anything but black wool or bombazine, both of which had no luster.  Lack of sparkle, indeed, was a theme.

The rules for widows were, of course, the most complex.  For the first  year a widow wore strictest black, with maybe a little very plain white lace at the throat or cuffs, and for some reason the hem of a mourning gown was supposed to be at least three inches deep (I’ve tried to find the reason; if anyone knows, please let me know).  She wore a black cap–as modest as possible–and when she went out, a black crape veil over her bonnet.  According to Emily Post, writing a century later, this unrelieved black was supposed to offer a widow protection:

A widow or mother, in the newness of her heavy veil, has her hard path made as little difficult by everyone with whom she comes in contact, no matter on what errand she may be bent. A clerk in a store will try to wait on her as quickly and as attentively as possible.  Acquaintances avoid stopping her with long conversations that could but torture and distress her.  She meets small kindnesses at every turn, which save unnecessary jars to sensitive nerves.

Reading this, it seems to me this would have been horribly isolating for a widow, everyone kindly hurrying her out of sight, away from anything that might distract her from her grief.  Being un-isolated was frowned on (just think of Scarlett O’Hara, in full widow’s weeds, shocking her circle by dancing at a fundraising ball). Being un-isolated was a slap in the face of your husband’s memory; friends might call and chat for half an hour, but unless you had to, you did not go out in the world.

A year and a day after the death, a widow could go into “half-mourning,” when she could wear mixed black and white (which suggests that the woman in the illustration above would be in half-mourning) for another six months.  After another six months the widow might begin to wear lighter, but still subdued, colors: dove gray, lavender, purple, or white (confusingly, this is sometimes also called half-mourning, or light-mourning).  Clothes were still kept simple, and while one’s jewelry was no longer restricted to a wedding ring and maybe a mourning brooch with a lock of the lost one’s hair in it, jewelry was kept simple too.

Widowers were expected to mourn for two years, just like widows–but, particularly when he had kids–a man was also expected to be looking for a new wife to help raise them.  There was no half-mourning period when going out looking for a wife was suddenly acceptable; the widower might have worn his mourning (black coat, black cravat, and a black arm-band) even while he was looking for a new wife.  After a time (he determined what that time was) he might have lightened his clothes a little, but continued to wear the arm-band.

Mourning wasn’t confined to husband or wife, of course.  Children were not expected to mourn so long for parents or siblings–a year at most–and parents were expected to mourn no more than a year for a child.  Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins–one brought out the black for all of them, but for a few months only.  In the case that someone outside the family died–a friend, or perhaps a Royal Personage–one would wear black to the funeral, and then a black arm-band or black gloves.

Perhaps keeping track of these rules was a comfort, or a distraction.  On the other hand, at a time when an illness could carry a child off in a day, women routinely died in childbirth, and there was a war going on across the Channel, death was a part of life, and one might go from bereavement to bereavement without getting out of mourning clothes or black gloves for years.

Researching all this, I was trying to think how an extended period of mourning would sit with the modern world.  We expect people to mourn for a little while, then snap out of it, or keep their feelings decently hidden.  Wearing mourning not only guaranteed some consideration, it signaled that you weren’t required to snap out of it just yet.  On the other hand, it sounds as if a widow of good family, with servants to handle the day-to-day work, a governess to see to her children, and no other work to fill her days, might have been a very lonely woman indeed.

I have said elsewhere that I don’t like finish-sewing: hemming, cleaning up seams, sewing on trim and making buttonholes.  I like the big architectural aspect of sewing (in the same way that I like putting together Ikea furniture: you take many pieces and turn them into something else).  But there’s no point in spending money on fabric and notions and then leaving the seams to fray and the bottom to straggle and the buttons to go unbuttoned.  So I screwed my courage and my patience to the sticking point and hemmed and lined and stitched and, yes, buttonholed.

This is the lining for the back.  When you’ve got a curved seam you clip it so that it lies flat.  I wanted a really nice, tidy seam; thus, the French seam: after the seam is sewn, you clip one side very close to the stitching, fold the other on top of it with the raw edge tucked in, and stitch along the fold.  The result: 

When all the lining was stitched to the dress fabric, the sleeves set and the skirt attached, I then had to pin and hand-stitch the lining so that it covered all the unfinished bodice and sleeve seams, like so:

All the seams on the skirt were French-seamed too (really, you don’t want shreds of thread getting caught in your stockings when you’re trying to look ladylike and put together.  Then hemming; another hand-sewing job.  Since the skirt was lined, this meant two hems.  You want your hemstitching to be as invisible as possible, but you also want it to be strong enough to withstand, say, an inadvertent foot catching therein.

This was the best I could do:

Finally, the buttonholes.  I am no way pleased with the machined buttonholes on the dress, but with the buttons in place they don’t look too terrible.  I hope.

Sadly, with the buttons unbuttoned, the result was less pleasing.  With machine-sewn buttonholes I did the sewing first, and cut the hole afterward.

And here is the final product.  Which looks better on than off (the hallmark of a successful garment, I always think):

As for the coat: there were so many layers of fabric in the coat, I didn’t want to do machined buttonholes.  So I did them the old fashioned way, by hand.  With hand-sewn buttonholes, you cut the hole first and then bind the hole with stitching.

Finally: this time I did not make a blood sacrifice to the project, which was a happy thing.  On the other hand, a pin gave its all for the cause.  So glad it was the pin that got bent out of shape and not my finger.

The curious thing about this Regency sewing project?  I’m already thinking about the next project.

Meanwhile, back to writing.

Reading the diary, in particular, reminded me of the extent to which the production of an historical film of good intent (meaning, one that wants to get it right) relies on experts: the horse wrangler who teaches Willoughby how to drive a curricle (the sportscar of its day); the costumers and designers; the dance teachers; and Jane Gibson, “movement duenna and expert on all manners historical,” who taught bearing and manners and the reverence.  By which I mean bowing and curtseying.

During my brief career studying ballet as a kid the first thing Miss Dear (honest to God, it was her name) taught us was the “reverence,” a deep bow which was to be given to her at the beginning and end of each class.  Her class of 7-year-olds mostly teetered and tried not to fall over.  Later, when I took some classes in historic dance, I learned several different reverences: it wasn’t until some time in the 17th century, I believe, that bowing and curtseying split off into sex-differentiated motions.  According to Wikipedia, that font of all wisdom, the curtsey is a gesture of respect from an inferior to a superior.  Hence all those bobbing Victorian maids in the movies (“yes, m’lady.”  **bob**).  Per Thompson:

“We learn the root and meaning of the bows and curtsies–or reverences, as Jane calls them.  As you enter a room you ‘cast a gladdened eye’ about you.  Beautiful phrase….

The bow is the gift of the head and heart.  The curtsy (which is of course a bastardisation of the word ‘courtesy’) a lowering in status for a moment, followed by recovery.”

I had always understood the “lowering in status” part of the reverence, and that a superior may nod or bow less deeply to an inferior, either in dismissal or acknowledgment.  You would bow very deeply–abase yourself–to a King, less deeply to a baron, acknowledging their superior status.  My 21st century feminist self gets the status thing, even if she doesn’t believe in it, but was always troubled by the fact that a gentlewoman curtseyed to a gentleman (I believe in practice she was supposed to curtsey to him, then he would respond with a bow).  The idea of a recovery from that lowering of status pleases me.  ”I submit to your authority,” the curtsey says.  Or maybe, “I acknowledge that society places a higher value on your gender than on my own.”  And then the recovery: “But I submit only so far.”  And then the bow, acknowledgement and “gift of the head and the heart”.

It’s easy for me to want to read a taking back of authority in the recovery from a curtsey: I love the past, but I am firmly a creature of now.  One of the great tasks of writing then is to remember that Sarah Tolerance has no Gloria Steinem or Betty Friedan or Ms. Magazine in her background; that however independent she is, she’s still a woman of her time, and while she might not feel that the man she’s curtseying to is worthy of her respect, she would still go through the proper forms.  It’s her age, and not mine, that I am playing in.

__________

*I once read excerpts of Thompson’s diary from the movie Junior, with Arnold Schwarzenegger, in which she mentions that he was still so muscle-bound that it was difficult for him to tie his own tie–the muscles literally got in the way.  I was then editing comics, and made sure to mention this to those artists who seemed to think that moving like a gymnast and being built like a fireplug were not incompatible…