The Regency Years

My regional JASNA group has an book club, and our January book was The Regency Years, by Robert Morrison. It was absolutely terrific--essential reading for those of us who love Austen and Keats and history and Britain.

The book was comprehensive, explaining in easy to read, non-pedantic prose the politics and issues of the day, the social issues for all of the classes, slavery and the insidious way it infiltrated everyday life then and into the future. It had a wonderful section on the Napoleonic Wars and the part on Waterloo actually made sense having read Georgette Heyer's An Infamous Army twice. And, of course, it covered the writers and artists, celebrities, actors, and wannabes in extensive detail. I loved the section on the allure of the exotic, which finally helped me understand why the Regent's Brighton Pavilion was built and furnished as it was.

And, I absolutely loved the section on art, especially the Scottish painter David Wilkie and how his paintings are not unlike Sir Walter Scott's historical novels, and the contrast between John Constable's paintings and those of J.M.W. Turner. Now I want to get books on all three of these painters, and I might even finally read Waverly!

Below are David Wilkie's The Penny Wedding, John Constable's Wivenhoe Park, and J.M.W. Turner's Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino.

Despite exploring far-ranging topics, Morrison pulled all of the threads together to support his premise that the Regency was the bridge to modern Britain. He not only explores the impact of industrialization and how it fostered the romantic rural ideal and the tug-of-war between science and faith, but he uses Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to represent how technology and scientific advancements can be a two-edged sword, requiring society to figure out how to manage technology and not be destroyed by it.

Here are some passages that I marked as I read:

With regards to Pride and Prejudice:

When she [Elizabeth] tells him [Darcy] that she might have felt more concern in refusing him had he "behaved in a more gentleman-like manner," those words literally stagger him. They signal a powerful collision between his elitist assumptions and her bourgeois aspirations. Darcy believes that he was born a gentleman. Elizabeth hopes that someday he might become one...she ushers in the modern world, for she believes in meritocracy over aristocracy, individual preferences over dynastic alliances, and female desire over male presumption.

With regards to the Prince Regent's Brighton Pavilion:

The Pavilion is his shrine to the expertise, the originality, and the sheer bravado of his Regency, and it reveals the Oriental fantasies at the crux of the decade. Part homage and part pastiche, it is, remarkably, an Eastern structure that most spectacularly represents the British Regency.

 Lord Byron 

When Byron rated the "three great men of the nineteenth century," he placed "himself third, Napoleon second, and [Beau] Brummell first."

The picturesque

The Industrial Revolution left deep scars on rural England, but one of the most remarkable features of Regency Britain is how many areas of the countryside were virtually unaffected by it...Humphrey Repton was the premier landscape gardener of the age and an enthusiastic exponent of the picturesque, which he defined as a middle ground between the unruliness of nature and the rigidity of art.

Frankenstein

More than any other work in English literature, Frankenstein is a prophecy about the modern world. In addition to launching an entirely new genre of science fiction, it has had an incalculable impact on the way we imagine science...Frankenstein unnervingly reveals that scientific research has the potential to improve our lives in countless ways, but that if we deny or ignore our responsibilities, new discoveries have also the potential to pass dangerously far beyond the control of their makers and assume hideous and unpredictable forms that may betray or even destroy us.

Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets

Passion: A Novel of the Romantic Poets, by Jude Morgan, blew me away it was so good.  It's a bit of a ruse to say that it's a novel of the Romantic poets as it really is more of a novel of the women behind the Romantic poets, but that is by no means a criticism of the book.

The Romantic poets whose stories are told from the perspective of the women in their lives are Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

With regards to Byron, the leading ladies are the infamous Lady Caroline Lamb and Byron's half-sister, Augusta Leigh, who became as notorious as Lady Caroline when it became known that Byron was the father of at least one of her children, and his wife, Annabella Millbanke.  The latter is portrayed as the only real villain in the novel, which is a refreshingly contrary view to the usual one in which she is portrayed as victim.  Lady Caroline's voice was particularly striking--always first person, usually manic, often sad.  I got the feeling she was truly born in the wrong century.  She would have been a powerhouse in the 1990s!

Lady Caroline Lamb

With regards to Shelley, the novel begins with Mary Wollstonecraft, who died after giving birth to the woman who would become Shelley's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (aka Mary Shelley).  Mary Shelley's step-sister, Jane/Claire Claremont is also a featured player in the Shelley domestic drama as she lived with the Shelleys almost continuously during their marriage, and she and Shelley had a closer than comfort relationship.

Mary Shelley

Finally, anyone who has seen Bright Star will thrill to know that Fanny Brawne is the sole lady around whom Keats rotates, and theirs is a truly heart-breaking story.  Although the Brawne/Keats story is but a fraction of the novel, with the bulk going to Byron (always the attention hog) and Shelley, I loved this part of the story the most.  Partly because I've loved Keats for decades and partly because their story is so poignant.

Fanny Brawne

Although I am a big fan of historical fiction, it is a rare historical fiction author who can really capture the tone, style, feeling, and sense of a timeframe and a real historical personage and make them sound true and real and not just a 21st century person in period dress.  Jude Morgan is an absolute master of the genre and I cannot praise him enough for making Byron, Shelley, Keats, Caroline, Augusta, Mary, Jane/Claire, and Fanny come to life in this novel.

What I particularly loved about this novel is that Morgan shows fully developed people, warts and all--no sugar coating here, no pandering to genius, but at the same time no denigration of the genius that clearly shone forth in the three poets and Mary Shelley.  They display the most human failings--all the seven deadly sins are there in abudance--but you can see how those failings are but a side-show to the literary work they do take seriously.

It was also very interesting to read a view of Regency England that varies so much from the Austenian world I'm used to.  For the most part, there really wasn't a place in England for Byron and Shelley considering how they wanted to live their lives. 

This book made me renew my pledge to read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein this year as well as find a good bio of Mary.  I particularly liked the relationship between Mary and Byron--she might have been the one woman who didn't try to seduce him and vice versa and they seemed to really understand each other's genius to a degree that I didn't see between any of the other characters, including Mary and Shelley.  Interestingly, we never really see or hear Shelley and Byron talking to each other without one or more of their women present, nor do we see either interacting at all with Keats.  This is the story of the women, not their famous men. 

The other Jude Morgan novel that looks particularly good is The Taste of Sorrow, about the Brontes. I have yet to read a fictionalized version of the Brontes that I like so I'm hopeful given what he was able to do with Passion.