Guest Leigh Michaels: How to Have an Affair, Regency Style

Linda Banche here. Today I welcome Leigh Michaels, whose latest book is the Regency historical, The Mistress’ House. Here she talks about how to conduct an affair in Regency times.

Leave a comment with your email address for a chance to win one of the two copies of The Mistress’ House which Sourcebooks has generously provided. Leigh will select the winners. Check the comments to see who won, and how to contact me to claim your book. If I cannot contact the winners within a week of their selection, I will award the books to alternates. Note, Sourcebooks can mail to USA and Canada addresses only.

And the winners Leigh selected are StephB and catslady! Ok, you two, I know who you are and I've sent you email.

Welcome, Leigh!

There were many ways for a Regency gentleman to carry on an affaire, from visiting a bordello to sneaking into a lady’s bedroom at a house party to finding a quiet nook in a hay barn on his country estate. Sometimes the location depended on the duration and depth of the attachment between the lovers; a few years before the Regency period, the Duke of Devonshire installed his mistress – who also happened to be his wife’s best friend – right in his household, and he carried on the affair until the death of the duchess left him free to marry his mistress.

But the most romantic-sounding of all the possible ways for a pair of lovers to get together was the love nest – where a gentleman hired or bought a small house in which he could install the lady of the moment in comfort and security (for her) and convenience (for him). As Thorne thinks when he’s considering buying the house which becomes The Mistress’ House:

There was certainly merit to the notion of buying a house just off Portman Square. If he could tuck a mistress into a trysting place just a step from his own garden, he could avoid a long list of inconveniences. Kicking his heels for hours while messages were delivered and answers returned… Riding halfway across London for an assignation… Finding new, safe, and very secluded meeting places… Wandering around the halls of a country house trying to locate a particular lady’s bedchamber… Keeping his horses, and the grooms who cared for them, waiting outside a private house on a cold day…
© Leigh Michaels, Sourcebooks Casablanca, 2011

Young women of the day – even those who had been married and widowed – were well-protected from scandal even when they didn’t wish to be. In The Mistress’ House, Anne Keighley is staying in her brother’s house, so she can’t exactly invite her lover to stop by her bedroom. Living with relatives means that her time has to be accounted for, or her brother and sister-in-law will ask questions. She can’t simply go off by herself without taking along a maid or footman or groom, and her brother’s servants owe their loyalty to the man who pays their wages.

Throw in the practicalities – like a gentleman’s coat that was so tightly fitted it required assistance to put on, and a lady’s corset and petticoats – and it’s a wonder clandestine Regency lovers ever managed to get naked together.

So the idea of a love nest – a private house where a couple could be together with minimal risk of interruption – was an attractive option for the man who could afford it. His mistress would be always on call, at his convenience. And when he tired of one paramour, he could move her out while he was looking around for her replacement.

Though having a discreet little love nest right around the corner didn’t quite work out the way Thorne hoped it would in The Mistress’ House…

In the book, the love nest is located at Number 5, Upper Seymour Street (isn’t that a lovely aristocratic address?) Though no illustration exists, maps of the period show there was a real house located there, pretty much as it’s described in the book. It stood directly beside the entrance to Berkeley Mews, just around the corner from Portman Square.

Today it’s just called Seymour Street. The houses are gone, and a hotel now occupies the site where The Mistress’ House stood during the Regency era. It’s fitting, I think, that the hotel is called the Hyatt Regency!

THE MISTRESS’ HOUSE BY LEIGH MICHAELS – IN STORES FEBRUARY 2011
Three beautifully intertwined love stories…

The rules are made to be broken…
When the handsome, rakish Earl of Hawthorne buys the charming house across the back garden from his town home, he never expects the lovely lady he installs there to ensnare him completely…

Again…
After Lady Keighley marries the earl, it seems a shame to leave the house empty, so she offers it to her childhood friend Felicity Mercer, who discovers that the earl’s gorgeous cousin is precisely the man she’s been waiting for…

and again…
Finally, feisty Georgiana Baxter moves into the house to escape an arranged marriage, and encounters the earl’s friend Major Julian Hampton late one night in the back garden. The handsome soldier is more than willing to give her the lessons she asks for…

There is plenty of gossip, scandal, and torrid speculations surrounding the “mistress’ house”, but behind closed doors, passions blaze…

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Leigh Michaels is the author of nearly 100 books, including 80 contemporary novels and more than a dozen non-fiction books. More than 35 million copies of her romance novels have been published by Harlequin. A 6 time RITA finalist, she has also received two Reviewer's Choice awards from Romantic Times, and was the 2003 recipient of the Johnson Brigham Award. She is the author of On Writing Romance, published in January 2007 by Writers Digest Books. Leigh also teaches romance writing on the Internet at Gotham Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Des Moines, Iowa. For more information, please visit www.leighmichaels.com.