REGENCY IN COLORADO: The Denver Art Museum

by

Sheri Cobb South

When one thinks of Regency England, I’ll admit that Denver, Colorado doesn’t exactly leap to mind. Still, while it’s no substitute for a trip to London or Bath, the Denver Art Museum contains sufficient pieces from the period to keep Regency aficionados happily engaged for a few hours—and with an admission charge of ten dollars per person, the price is certainly right.

The Denver Art Museum comprises two buildings; those interested in its Regency and Georgian holdings will want the North Building, specifically the sixth floor. Here you’ll find one room of the gallery is dedicated to the “Golden Age” of British portraiture, generally considered to encompass the 1720s to the middle of the 19^th century. (Please note that most, perhaps all, of these portraits are part of the very extensive Berger Collection, on long-term loan to the museum, and the ones on display are rotated through the gallery; therefore, different paintings may be on display at the time of your visit. If there is a particular painting or paintings that you especially wish to see, it might be a good idea to contact the museum first.)

One of my favorites was this portrait, Master Roger Mainwaring, by Henry Thomson, RA, from about 1810. A nearly life-sized representation, it shows young Roger at about eight years old (give or take a year or two) ready to go fishing, with his rod in his hand and his creel at his feet. The museum’s information panel notes, charmingly, that the rod is too big for him—as is the balustrade he’s trying, not entirely successfully, to sit on.

Another I especially liked was Master Page, Anne Page, and Slender, by John Downman, ARA. This painting, also from about 1810, depicts a scene from one of the amateur theatricals that were a popular entertainment at house parties. In this case, the play being performed is William Shakespeare’s The Merrie Wives of Windsor. Because this painting came to the Berger collection from the descendants of the sitters, we know exactly who is portrayed here: John Dawkins (left) is playing the part of Slender, with his sister Susannah in the role of Anne Page and her husband, lawyer Sir Edward Dodsworth, as Master Page. There’s certainly no question as to who is having the most fun, is there? “Slender” appears to be having a blast, while poor Sir Edward looks like he’s just praying for the curtain to fall!

A doorway leads from this gallery into a large room where Georgian and Regency furniture is on display. The star of the show, at least in my opinion, is this gorgeous chaise longue from about 1810, but other pieces are well worth a look, including this gracefully curved chair from about 1825 

and this work table from about 1820.

According to the information panel, the raised center section of the table could be removed to reveal a chess board beneath, or lowered for use as a writing desk. The silk bag hanging below provided a place for ladies to store their needlework. There are more pieces, of course, but space doesn’t permit me to show them all.

Take the elevator down to level four, and you’ll find a collection of Spanish Colonial art, which includes several pieces from the Regency period (although of course the Spanish didn’t call it that!).

Here you’ll find more home furnishings, including this 18^th-century settee. Unlike the green chaise longue we saw earlier, whose silk upholstery was a modern reproduction, this one still has its original silk damask cushions, hence its rather worn appearance.

There are also paintings in the Spanish Colonial collection, including this Portrait of Francisco Javier Paredes by Francisco Aguirre from about 1800. Its subject was a Spanish gentleman who served as a colonel stationed in Mexico. The information panel cites his luxurious accessories: a diamond ring on the little finger of his right hand; numerous gold buttons on his double-breasted waistcoat; the elaborate medal and chain pinned to his hat; the sword he wears, the hilt of which is just visible; and the walking stick he carries.

The Portrait of a Lady  by an unknown artist is from Argentina or Chile, and dates from the 1820s or 1830s, but the gold jewelry she wears reflects the earlier Neoclassical style favored by the Empress Josephine Bonaparte. I confess, when I saw this painting I immediately thought of the Marchesa in Georgette Heyer’s The Grand Sophy!

Finally, one of my favorite items in the Spanish Colonial collection was this fan. Although it depicts people in 18^th-century dress, the panel cites a date in the 19^th century, so this was apparently a “historical” scene at the time it was made. The sticks are made of mother-of-pearl, and although it’s part of the Spanish Colonial exhibit, the panel says it is probably of French manufacture. I couldn’t help wondering how it traveled from France into the hands of some long-ago lady living in what is now South America. That, to me, is what museums are for: telling (or at least hinting at) the stories of those long gone, as revealed by the things they left behind.

* * *

Sheri Cobb South is the author of the John Pickett series of Regency-set mysteries, as well as the critically acclaimed Regency romance The Weaver Takes a Wife. For more of her unique stateside take on the Regency, see her blog entry “Regency in Alabama” at http://lesleyannemcleod.blogspot.com/2011/08/regency-in-alabama-vine-olive-colony-of.html?m=1

Happy Birthday, Georgette Heyer

Today is Georgette Heyer's birthday! Since she would be 111 years old today, I guess this makes it her (according to Tolkien) eleventieth birthday.

Georgette Heyer is hailed by scores of fans as being the quintessential Regency Romance novelist. Most people credit her for creating not on the genre called Historical Romance, but its subgenre, Regency Romance. Heyer reportedly had a  brother who was chronically ill, so to amuse him, she wrote a series of stories. Inspired by Jane Austen, Heyer wrote stories that took place in England during the Regency Era.

Since she lived a hundred years later than Austen, Heyer had the disadvantage of having to research the manners and mores of the time. However, according to rumor, her grandmother who lived with her family was raised during the late Regency and became Heyer's model for her Regency speech and customs.

Some critics find Heyer's novels filled with too much detail, others consider her detail to be her greatest asset, with her wit coming in as a close second. She wrote not only Regencies, but other historical novels including one about William the Conqueror hailed as one of the most historically accurate writings about the long ago King of England. She also wrote contemporary novels and thrillers.

I admit I haven't read all of her books, but I plan to. Of those I have read, here are my favorites:

Cotillion, The Corinthian, A Civil Contract, Venetia, and Beauvallet.

This question of who our favorite Heyers books are came up in my Regency historical research group, and here were our group answers as to the number of people who rated their top 5 favorites:

10 -- Venetia

9 -- The Grand Sophy

9 -- Devil’s Cub

8 -- Cotillion

7 -- The Unknown Ajax

7 -- Sylvester

6 -- Frederica

6 -- Arabella

4 -- The Nonesuch

4 -- Faro’s Daughter

3 -- These Old Shades

3 -- The Talisman Ring

3 -- The Reluctant Widow

3 -- Masqueraders

2 -- The Toll Gate

2 -- The Quiet Gentleman

2 -- The Convenient Marriage

2 -- Spanish Bride

2 -- Regency Buck

2 -- Black Sheep

1 -- The Corinthian

1 -- Lady of Quality

1 -- False Colours

1 -- Civil Contract

1 -- An Infamous Army

1 -- Why Shoot a Butler?

Here is more information about Heyer on Wiki.

So, to celebrate, the anniversary of Georgette Heyer's birth, name your five favorite Heyer books.

New Georgette Heyer Biography

Two years after it was published in Great Britain, Jennifer Kloester's brilliant biography of Georgette Heyer has been brought out this year in the U.S. by Sourcebooks. Kloester dedicates the book to Heyer's only child, Richard Rougier (1932-2007) and to the author of the 1984 biography of Heyer, Jane Aiken Hodge, both of whom gave her complete access to their letters, notes, and in the case of Rougier, remembrances. He also provided the author with many personal pictures of Heyer.

The new biography differs vastly from Hodge's earlier effort. While both stress that Georgette Heyer (1902-1974) was intensely private, never gave interviews, never took a book tour, did not sit for autographing, refused to pose for author pictures, and never revealed her married name (Rougier), Aiken's book attempts to reveal Heyer's personality by analyzing her novels—and in many instances by supposition and inferences.

Kloester's imminently readable book makes no inferences but lets Heyer's extant letters, numbering over 1,000 pages, breathe life into the clever, erudite, humorous, and self-deprecating Heyer, who wrote 55 novels, six of which she later suppressed.

The heart and soul of Kloester's 400-page book are the letters Heyer wrote to her agents and publishers over the course of her career. In her ten years of researching, Kloester managed not only to assemble these letters from the earliest days of Heyer's 50-year career but also to present them in highly readable form with elucidating footnotes and helpful contextual information.

A published author—at 18 

 Heyer was a rare breed like J.R.R. Tolkein who invented a genre which has been widely imitated. Astonishingly, the first of her Regency romances was written when she was just seventeen. The Black Moth, her first book, debuted in 1921 and has remained in print for more than 90 years.

During those early years, she dabbled with serious contemporary, coming-of-age stories as well as an ambitious Restoration-era tome, but found her calling with her witty period romances that were noted for their humor and the thoroughness of her research.

 

Heyer’s research

For Infamous Army, she read 26 books about Waterloo’s campaign, soldiers, officers, etc. and for four months filled notebooks with detailed information on the hundred days between Napolean’s escape from Elba and the clash at Waterloo. This included biographies of notables, troop movements, uniforms, weaponry, first-person accounts, maps, and a detailed chronology. She was flattered that her book was used by military students at Sandhurst.

Her personal library included more than 2,000 historical reference books, even though she preferred primary references.

In fact when she wanted her publisher to sue Barbara Cartland for a number of instances which Heyer considered blatant plagiarism, she said words she had used – and which had been copied—she had never seen anywhere else except in one of her unpublished sources. (The Aiken biography never names Cartland as the author imitating Heyer.) Though Heyer felt strongly Cartland had plagariized not only her plots but many of her characters as well as terminology, no lawsuit was ever filed, but her publishers must have been in communication with Cartland’s publishers because the “copying” stopped.

The Breadwinner

After a five-year, largely absentee courtship and two months after a heart attack claimed her adored father, Heyer at age twenty three married mining engineer Ronald Rougier. Her father's sudden death left her mother in financial difficulties, and Georgette took on the burden of providing for her mother and paying for the education of the youngest of her two brothers.

Between 1921 and 1935 she published 19 novels, and from the time that Ronald gave up his engineering career to return to England, Heyer was never free of financial worries. Her letters to her agent are full of her blown-up fears of bankruptcy.

 

In 1935 she suffered a nervous breakdown, and the following year she backed her husband's plan to study for the bar even though it meant she was the only wage earner for their family of three as well as her mother.

Her financial worries continued to mount. It is interesting to read her complaints to her agent about being treated like a midlist author, though that term was never used:

            They [publisher] are only concerned with their high lights. . . First, they apparently regard me as a certain seller up to a certain number of copies, & see little point in trying to push sales beyond that maximum. Second, they do not advertize me. Third, they seem to be unable to get the book reviewed.

More of her discontent with her publisher was expressed to her agent in 1937 when she informed her agent she was quite sure her editors “or any member of the firm” ever read her books. “No one ever bothers me for a synopsis for the purpose of advertising.”  In that same lengthy diatribe, she writes that no one in the firm even realized Devil’s Cub was a sequel to her popular These Old Shades.

She was always encouraging her agent to get her books serialized in the magazines, which was not only a great way to build an author but also paid extremely well. 

Sells rights to books for £250 

At one point she was so desperate for money, she sold the rights to three of her books for £750—or £250 a book! In 1940 she signed away British Commonwealth copyrights to These Old Shades, Devil's Cub, and Regency Buck to her publisher, Heinemann. Reflecting on that 30 years later when she was at the pinnacle of her success, Heyer wrote:

            Doesn't it seem fantastic thirty years later that £750 should have been considered by the valuers on both sides to have been a pretty generous price? It led me to rout out my old account book, and I see that it was generous! In those days my gross income very rarely got into four figures. It is now five figures. . . They got a very good bargain, but I don't begrudge it them, remembering, as I do to what straits we were reduced at the time.

The golden years

It had taken her more than twenty years to build her career to be lucrative, and by then—in the late 1940s—she had to pay the Inland Revenue approximately 85 percent of her annual earnings. At that time Ronald purchased a Rolls Royce, and they had moved into Albany, a quiet oasis in the heart of London. Albany had been the residence of several noted authors and a couple of prime ministers over its two-century history. The Rougiers would make their home there for a quarter of a century.

 Though her books had sold moderately in the United States over the years, sales took off in the 1950s. From the late forties until her death in 1974, she was one of the world’s bestselling authors, though she had difficulty believing that “books of substance” did not sell better than her “fluff.” She was shocked when her publisher told her there was no other author who could rival her world-wide sales.

The had always aspired to write respected historical novels and never realized the witty Regency romance genre she created would immortalize her. Now, forty years after her death, her books are still bestsellers.—Cheryl Bolen, author of the Regent Mysteries

Discover Georgette Heyer

Linda Banche here. What are your Georgette Heyer moments? What’s your fondest memory of her books? And if you haven’t read her, why not? To help you out, Sourcebooks has offered a three book set (one romance, one historical fiction and one mystery) of Georgette Heyer’s works to one of the people who comment on this blog (US and Canada addresses only). And this time, I’m the one who will select the winner. So, leave your Heyer moments with your email address in the comment section.

And the winner is Laura Hartness! Congratulations, Laura, and thanks to all for coming over. Laura, I haven't heard from you yet. Please send me an email at linda@lindabanche.com. If I do not hear from you by August 26, I will reward the books to an alternate.

Now for my Heyer moments.

If you know Regency romance, you know Georgette Heyer.

I read my first Georgette Heyer book when I was in high school. The book was Powder and Patch. I didn’t understand anything the author described: men wearing silk stockings and shoes with high red heels, and white powder and patches on their faces. Did they really? But I persisted, and I liked the book. I also read The Nonesuch, and I started, but never finished, The Tollgate.

Fast forward to the present. The next time I read Georgette Heyer was last year. I loved The Quiet Gentleman. The hero’s blond, and I love blond heroes, but he’s also what Ms. Heyer called her Mark 2 hero, what we would call Type B. (I hate alpha males.) The Quiet Gentleman also contains a mystery, and I like a romance that contains something else besides the love story. My review of The Quiet Gentleman is here.

I also read Sylvester or The Wicked Uncle, which I didn’t like as much because the hero is a Mark 1, or Type A. But it’s still a fun story. My review of Sylvester or The Wicked Uncle is here.

I also read Bath Tangle, which also is great fun, but again, I didn’t like the Mark 1 hero. My review of Bath Tangle is here.

I also read The Talisman Ring, which I enjoyed both because of the Mark 2 hero, the no-nonsense heroine and the embedded mystery.

Georgette Heyer also wrote mysteries and historical fiction. I’ve read her mystery They Found Him Dead. I like mysteries set in the 1930’s and this one is wonderful for those of you who share my enthusiasm for this type of story. Here’s my review of They Found Him Dead.

If you would like some information of Georgette Heyer's life, here’s my review of The Private World of Georgette Heyer by Joan Aiken Hodge.

Those are my Georgette Heyer moments. What are yours? Again, leave your comment and email address for a chance to win a grab bag of three Georgette Heyer books. And even if you don’t win, Sourcebooks offers some great deals on her books this month:

All Available Georgette Heyer eBooks on sale for $2.99 from Tuesday August 14th – Monday August 20th!  http://www.sourcebooks.com/readers/browse-our-lists/ebook-specials/1776-happy-birthday-ms-heyer-ebooks-for-299.html

Get 30% off any Heyer print book during the whole month of August at the Sourcebooks store by using the coupon code HEYER at checkout! http://www.sourcebooks.com/store/fiction/georgette-heyer/

Also, check out our Georgette Heyer Facebook page where we will be having discussions, parties and giveaways! http://www.facebook.com/thecompletegeorgetteheyer

Now, where are those comments?

Thank you all,
Linda