Reply Hazy, Ask Again Later

Posted by Kat Kimbriel

https://bookviewcafe.com/book-view-cafe-welcomes-new-member-alicia-rasley/

https://bookviewcafe.com/?p=20077

Interviewed by Kat Kimbriel

If you visit the web site Alicia Rasley is in the progress of building, you’ll find links and proposed links to essays she’s written about writing, researching, romance, and the English Regency. (She also writes mysteries, but she hasn’t built a page for that yet.) It’s there that the depth of her dozens of books is revealed. Because Regency romance fans know that the precise dates of Prince George’s rule for his deeply mentally ill father George III were less than a decade.

But Alicia points out something both simple and profound. Prior to the Regency we have two revolutions. First was the American Revolution, where for the first time in many centuries colonies threw off an empire to declare self-rule (and not any self rule—the rule of men, not kings.) Then the French Revolution, where inequality and starvation meant not only overthrowing a king but murdering the aristocratic class.

By the time Prince (eventually king) George dies in 1830, the world has dramatically changed. Democracy, railroads, the Industrial Age sweeping craftsmen to the side, the naval fleets of multiple countries devouring their forests and seeking new raw materials. Cultures are overwhelmed by empires armed with steel and lead, and fight to find footholds in new countries born in both trade and war.

A door opens, and the modern era is launched.

Alicia loves this fifty plus years of history. And she loves great romances. How could she not create wonderful tales of dashing military officers and daring traders, diplomats dealing with the Napoleonic Era, and whether kings continue to rule, but rule without absolute power? Who were the women who loved those men?

Romance! Passion! Duty! And of course a sprinkling of royalty.

Alicia’s first book with Book View Cafe is ROYAL RENEGADE, one of what she calls her South Coast romances. It’s 1811. The Prince is now Regent, Wellington has retaken Portugal, and Napoleon places Russia onto his calendar of conquest. Tatiana, the forgotten Russian princess hidden in the Winter Palace, figures into all their plans.

The novel opens with spirit and grandeur, and with an educated princess who knows who they want her to marry (“That murderer!”) as well as the overwhelming icy beauty of unimaginable wealth, the Winter Palace of the Russian Czar. (You’ll have to read the book to find out her fate!)

Alicia loves to travel, she loves to research, and she wants to bring her readers to the time and place of her stories. After reading Tatiana’s walk through a section of that palace, I wanted to ask Alicia about how she researches her work, what is the prep on each series she creates?

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1) Alicia, your classic Regency romances you’re bringing out this year are a rich blend of both the land and sea events of the Napoleonic Wars, and the diplomacy and skulduggery behind the known news.

How did you build this Regency world? You were born in Virginia and ended up in the Midwest—how did you fall in love with English history?

Well, Virginia fancies itself aristocratic and sort-of English. We had to take TWO years of Virginia history in school, and for the 150 years before the Revolution, Virginia was like “West Britain”.

Of course, I’m really just a reader, and I came to love history through reading historical novels. I come from a family of readers and travelers. I have 7 siblings, and my parents loved long road trips. You can imagine what driving 3000 miles to California was like with 8 kids. Well, my mother soon realized if she kept us well-supplied with pulp novels and comic books, we’d stop fighting. (Unfortunately, we were too fixated on our reading to do more than look up as we passed the Grand Canyon.) She was great at finding used bookstores in towns along the way, and I got a big supply of romance novels and children’s history stories. I was overjoyed to find a colorful book with drawings of King Arthur’s castle at Tintagel, and that started a lifelong interest in Epic English Edifices.

I just loved reading about England, from King Arthur to those weird British Boarding School novels. In high school, I read the Brontes and Austen. In a used bookstore in Jackson Hole, Wyoming (see what details stuck in my head), I found a whole cache of Georgette Heyer Regencies. I confess, I loved them more than the Austen books. They were just so funny.

When I majored in English, I learned how to read closely and analyze fiction. I was minoring in history, so when I decided to write a novel, I wrote a historical. Or part of one! This early book—I can’t remember the title—featured a Regency-era girl named Tatiana, believe it or not. She was a ballerina. I knew nothing about Russia or ballet, natch. When I resurrected Tatiana from my deep memory sector, I dropped the whole ballet angle. But as I recall, the hero was in the British military, just like Major Devlyn, who finally won Tatiana 2.0.

2) I know you love to travel. Did you go to historical locations from the Regency with your basic plots already in the back of your mind, or did the romances you ended up telling start with what you discovered on your travels?

I went to England first when I was 20, and found my way to Bath. I bought the Penguin editions of Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility, and lay in the grass in front of the Royal Crescent and read them. I just knew Miss Austen had trod right across this lawn! Since then, I’ve been back a dozen times, several times with my dear friend and fellow Regency writer Lynn Kerstan. Lynn had a graduate degree in English Lit, so we were both always ready to catch a train to wherever one of us hoped to set a book.

The great advantage of setting historical novels in Britain is… historical Britain is still there. They’re still occasionally excavating Anglo-Saxon gold hordes, and king’s bones (Richard III was found under a parking lot!). So when I happened upon Elham in Kent, and decided I was going to set my “Charity” book there, I could snap pictures of the high street and the Rose and Crown pub and the St. Mary the Virgin churchyard and know Charity had walked through the very same village.

Lynn was a lot more directed than I was in our travels. She decided where she wanted to set a novel, and that’s where we went. I remember one trip where she insisted we go to the Abbotsbury Swannery because she wanted to put a pair of swans in her next book.

I was more likely to fall in love at first sight with a village—like  Elham, and Bincombe in Dorset, where Tatiana eventually settled with Major Devlyn.  Then I would build the book—not just the setting—around this landscape. For example, I’m working on a novella about a romantic interlude at a cricket game near Elham, because that was where cricket started. (Do I know anything about cricket? Uh….)

3) You’ve mentioned you often choose travel destinations because famous authors’ homes and story settings are there, like Dartmoor for Agatha Christie, for example.

Did you do this to see how they were inspired by their surroundings? Because you thought they would be a good springboard for a romance or a mystery? What drew you to those locations?

I think the most moving experience was visiting Chawton, Hampshire, where Jane Austen lived in her last years. It is a pretty cottage, surrounded by lush countryside. She and her sister Cassandra felt themselves fortunate that their rich brother let them live there. Down the road is the brother’s Elizabethan manor house. I couldn’t avoid the realization that she wrote from life when she told about the brother’s financial abandonment of his sisters in Sense and Sensibility. Edward finally did his duty to support his maiden sisters, but too late. Jane’s health was already broken from years of penury while he lived in splendor. (Yes, I’m still vicariously furious with him.)

Agatha Christie’s house was a happier one. This was the reward she gave herself for being the bestselling author in the world. The house is maintained as it was in the 1950s, when she cultivated that garden and wrote her novels on that very typewriter. I walked through the walled garden and down to the boathouse, and suddenly realized—She had set several novels right here in this house! She disguised some of the details, but that boathouse was the scene of a murder in Dead Man’s Folly! And that patio over the river, that’s where the artist Amyas drank the poisoned beer in Five Little Pigs! And that big iron bell—that was the one that rang out to call the ferry over in Ordeal by Innocence! I learned that Agatha Christie was far tougher than I. I would never use my own home as a setting for murder (even a fictional one).

4) Which is first for you—your main characters in your fiction, or first the world, then the people living in it?

I think it’s usually the relationship. I’m most interested in how a couple interacts and what “shape” the relationship takes. Royal Renegade has my most romantic couple. After all, it started as a “Lancelot and Guinevere” homage. Poetic Justice is more of a “meeting of true minds”—two intellectuals who fall in love with each other’s intelligence. The couple in Reluctant Lady are best friends who take five years to finally give in to love.

So the relationship kind of dictates the world and the situation. Obviously in Royal Renegade, the situation has to be epic because it’s based on an epic story, and also, that generates more passion. When they fall in love, they’re putting the future of both their countries at stake, because she’s a pawn in the peace negotiations. So once I figured that out, I chose the point in the Napoleonic War when Russia is most at threat, and Britain is most isolated.

When I wanted that more intellectual couple, I again went high-stakes, but this time in the literary realm. What better English treasure could they seek than the lost play of Shakespeare? (By the way, Lynn Kerstan, a Shakespeare scholar, was the one who alerted me to this lost play when we were walking through Stratford-upon-Avon.)

So the couple comes first, and I bend the world around them!

5) You like to say that there are two types of travelers. What do you mean by that, and how does that dovetail with your stories set in distant places and times?

There are travelers like my niece Jordan Campbell, an early travel influencer, who seems always to be setting off for some completely novel destination. She visited 40 countries before she was forty. Recently she’s gone to unknown places like Patagonia and Mongolia. She just loves breaking new ground.

Then there are travelers like me. I always return to my favorite places. I always want to stay in Fitzrovia when I’m in London, and I’ve gone to the tiny cathedral city of Wells so often I became an honorary member of the local poetry society. (So what if I don’t write poetry? I can recite A. E. Housman and Robert Frost! They’re nice enough to let me get away with that.)

So my stories are usually set in places I know well. And since I discovered that time machine, well, I can return to the Regency time whenever I like!

I think readers fall into a similar binary duality. There are those who read only new books, and those like me who read the same beloved books over and over. (I mean, why take a chance?)

6) I’ve heard rumor of a “Literary Tour of England” you and a writer friend are planning for next year. Can you tell us anything about it, or is it a secret?

I’m hoping to go on an “Authorial Tour of England” next year with Cynthia Furlong Reynolds. We’re going to visit the homes of Dickens and the Brontes and of course Shakespeare. They’re all museums now, so we’ll see them as the authors did. Fortunately, we like all the same authors, so our wish lists match up perfectly.

Trouble is, we have both sworn off driving in Crazy Old England. I used to take my chances on the wrong-way roads, but at our age, it’s just too stressful. So we’re going to have to find the perfect tour company, or maybe hire an Oxford literature professor who doubles as a limo-driver.

7) What fiction are you working on right now? Do you work on more than one story at a time?

I do work on more than one at a time, but not in an efficient way. I write one until I get stuck, then go to the other one. Right now, I’m returning to Tatiana and Major Devlyn, 15 years older. Years ago, I wrote a Regency mystery novel with another Russian heroine, Natasha. Suddenly it occurred to me that I should connect these two ladies, so I had Natasha mention that she had a cousin in England who had lived with her family for a few months in 1801.

That was all I needed to set up the two cousins meeting 25 years later to solve a murder. I haven’t figured out who murders whom and what they have to do with the Russian cousins. I do know that Tatiana, though outwardly welcoming, wants no reminders of Russia and resists becoming fond of Natasha. But you know, solving a murder is a great way to deepen a friendship!

I’m also working away at an episodic novel, kind of the origin story of a man who becomes a British spymaster in the war against Napoleon. That starts in 1792. So these books’ settings bracket the Regency, which is why I’m doing my website on the “Romantic Revolutionary Regency era.” The excitement of that turn-of-the-century can’t be confined to just the 15 years of the official Regency.

8) You have nonfiction books in print on learning to write well. Do you have anything more you want to say on composition and how fiction differs from nonfiction? Would some of your shorter works on specific areas of writing make a good omnibus? 

In my day job, I teach composition to college students, and I’ve also turned my writing books into a series of fiction-plotting courses. I’m as much a teacher as a writer, and I love analyzing different aspects of writing, from structure and theme to sentences and word choice.

What I think I’m best at is teaching writers structure. The difference is that structure in non-fiction, or at least academic non-fiction, is logically ordered. You structure that research paper or that how-to book to build a framework of ideas in a logical sequence.

But fiction can be better structured thematically, on the development of themes through the interaction of the characters and the plot. So when I coach a story writer, I try to determine what the major themes and patterns are in their story, and suggest ways to use them as plot “tent poles”. So if a major theme is “trust”, the story could start with a scene of the main character being betrayed by someone she trusts. Then in the middle, there could be another issue of trust (maybe distrusting someone trustworthy), and the end could have a scene where trusting the right person helps resolve the plot problem. Without changing hardly any of the events of the plot, the author can deepen the coherence and connectivity of the story by developing that theme in major scenes.

It’s always easier to see that in someone else’s story!

9) I’ve heard that you have an incredible reference library you have picked up prowling in used bookstores worldwide. Do you have favorite research books you return to?

Lynn and I always tried to make a trip to the Welsh town Hay-on-Wye, the “used bookstore capital of the world.” I got a lot of my research books there—the 4-volumes of Churchill’s A History of the English-speaking Peoples,  3-volume biographies of both Wellington and Napoleon, Charles Oman’s magisterial History of the Peninsular War. When I started the origin story of the spymaster, I went rooting around in my bookcases and found four books on British espionage.

But my favorite are the cultural history books like Everyday English Life and The Grand Tour and Gentleman’s Clubs of London, Ackermann’s Cartoons of London Life. No, really, my favorite are the house books—Castles and Cottages. British Country Houses.

I really need to de-clutter. I’ve given away hundreds of novels, but I just can’t let go of my research books! Yes, we now have Google, but Google has no discernment. A writer of great learning and insight can take those bare facts about what battle was fought where and when, and weave them into a tapestry that incorporates universal conflicts and emotions into a human chronicle, not just a chronology.

10) What would you recommend, both to readers who love the same periods of history as you do, and to writers who want to make sure that the support beams holding up their fictional historical houses are sound construction?

I’d suggest figuring out the themes and patterns, not just of the characters and plot events, but of the setting. This time and place—what were the cultural currents? What were the conflicts deeply embedded in the society? In Regency England, social class was an inescapable theme. In the new United States at the same time, “the frontier” was both the promise and the threat that tantalized the citizens.

So what can you do with that, what does the theme mean, and what about the obverse? For example, in Regency England, I can’t help but notice that most of the creative and intellectual energy was in the upper-middle-class, not the landed gentry. The best writers and thinkers and inventors weren’t aristocrats, but rather the children of shopkeepers and solicitors prosperous enough to educate them but not enough to spoil them. So a Regency writer can show that this was a time when “upstarts” could lead the technological and artistic transformations—the poet John Keats,  Richard Trevithick (the railroad inventor) and Fanny Kemble (of the great acting family).  I have a physician character who marries into the aristocracy and is knighted for his military service, but never stops making reverse-snobby observations about the wastrel nobility. That’s exploring the setting’s central theme by observing it “slant”, as Emily Dickinson would call it.

So what is a central theme of this time and place, and how does it affect the characters?  That’s what I’d ask an author.

11) Did you say on a group list a while back that you’re writing a travel guide on small and medium towns in the Midwest? And the guide is especially to answer the question “Do you want to live in a small town? Retire in one?” (I could have SO used your book seven years ago, and boy, could we talk about things I didn’t consider before I moved.)

I’d love to hear about your experience!  Yes, every weekend my husband and I go to another small town in Indiana (‘the most boring state in the country’). We’ve seen 200, and are writing up our observations about the history and culture and livability of the most interesting towns. With so many people able to work remotely, they might well consider moving to a great town with cheap real estate and community spirit.

We both grew up in small towns, but grew into city people (Chicago and Indianapolis). And we have to think about what you mentioned, the things to consider BEFORE you fall in love with that lovely Victorian mansion just ripe for restoration in that cute town. Like—where is the nearest hospital with an ICU? 40 miles away? Uh-oh.

And this little town of 400 set near the national forest might seem like a great rural area to raise children… but those children are all too soon going to be teenagers and resent you for imprisoning them in a place without a McDonald’s.

We’ve determined that county seats and college towns often combine the amenities and culture of a city with the warmth and quaintness of a small town. Right now, my favorite is New Albany, a beautiful old river town just across the Ohio from Louisville (several great hospitals!) with fully restored Victorian houses going for less than $400K. I’d move there in a minute, except it would take me 5 years to de-clutter and weed through all my many research books!

12) What do you wish that some interviewer would ask you, but no one ever does? Now’s the time to share!

Hmm—I think, “What wouldn’t you write about?”

I wouldn’t write about my own life. For one thing, my mother would come back and haunt me if I put her in one of my books. And you know, truth is, my life has been too dull. I’d be an inferior heroine. The hero would come by on his white horse and offer to sweep me away, and I’d say, “No, thanks. I still have 14 years of ‘Midsomer Mysteries’ on my watch list!’

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We’re so happy Alicia Rasley has joined Book View Cafe. Alicia’s BVC Bookshelf is over here. https://bookviewcafe.com/bvc_author/alicia-rasley/

Her evolving web site is https://www.aliciarasley.com/ . This is where Alicia is building a library of articles she’s written about the Regency period in England, and fascinating essays on things like Regency games of chance and even Regency cocktails.

https://bookviewcafe.com/book-view-cafe-welcomes-new-member-alicia-rasley/

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