Since Mother Eve in the Garden long ago

Wouldn't The Way We Live Now be just perfect for a modernized adaptation? All about stocks and greed and cheating and the excesses of the super-rich ... Someone needs to make it.

I did a post on fashion and feminism (namely the idea that after periods where women are more liberated society responds by forcing women into more feminine fashions), and I should share it here since I think it's one of the few things I post there that's of general interest.

My Godey'ses and Peterson's are making me obsessed with Civil War-era dress. It's so annoying how easily my interests (obsessions) turn.

Jillian really thinks consulting is the way to go, re: employment, because museums are more likely to be able to get grants for projects than to be able to guarantee funding for a hire. I mean, one place I applied to seems to be simply not filling their educator position.

At the last library book sale, I picked up Wild Conquest, by Hannah Howell, because despite so many examples to the contrary, I have a bad tendency to believe the impassioned defenses of the romance novel as brilliant because it shows the human spirit and true emotion etc. etc. etc. Okay, I don't think the idea of the genre is bad - in theory, I love it. I love love stories. And I super love a lot of tropes that go with romance novels. But because so many of them are churned out by writers who have to put them out one after another, often in the same narrow subgenre, they can be really shitty.

( why I had to stop in the middle of this one )

So no more romance novels for me ever unless they are by Eloisa James, I don't care how attractive the summary is, it will never be the way I want.

So I decided I needed to read a romance novel, because I haven't done that in a while, but I only read Jo Beverley and Eloisa James now because the rest have too high a frequency of irritation for me. I hadn't read a Jo Bev in a long time so I can't remember what exactly it was that put her on my good list, but I saw one of hers at the book sale and it involved kidnappings, so yeah.

Anyway it's interesting to me because of the way RegencyWorld gets into people's heads. There have been a couple of instances where I'm impressed with Beverley's comparative understanding of 1760s clothing (like, she knows the difference between stays and jumps, that clothes are going to fit differently with them, and that stomachers are a thing), but there are these little things that don't bother me, it's just that I notice them and it's funny to me.

Like, she wants to show that Bella used to be frivolous, so she says that she never had to make decisions more stressful than how to trim a bonnet. Which isn't impossible, but with 18thc bonnets there just isn't that much trimming and it's not as changeable as Regency bonnet fashions. And then later on a guy wraps her up in a shawl.

It's just interesting, insert some academic-sounding line about clothing and the way it affects the way we think and conceptualize the world and the way it gets in our heads.

(There's also the gripe I have that applies to pretty much everyone - referring to a particular dress as the "[color] [fabric]". It's the logic of it. Do you have a dress in two materials for every color for every part of the day? If you don't, do you really need to specify that you want to wear the blue silk to the fabulous ball rather than the blue serge? Or that you're going to go for a long walk in the forest in the grey wool rather than the grey velvet?

OR JUST SAY "ONE" AFTER THE FABRIC, PLEASE.)

(I've been on vacation for the past week and so I've seen very few posts and I should write about what I did, and I will later, but right now this.)

It's very rare that I won't finish a book. I think getting free ones for the Kindle is helping me get to the point where I can say, "Okay. This is not getting better. Let's not bother." The book pushing me onward this week is called His Not-So-Sensible Miss.

The first quarter or so of the book is seriously just about the hero and heroine, with nobody else appearing. The heroine, Emily, is the ward of a local duke (you will notice that I am unfazed at the casual use of a duke, because I am a broken woman) but the daughter of a vicar's daughter and a professor at Oxford, both deceased. She comes across the hero, Dillon Chambers, when he's working on this cottage he bought in the country and thinks he's a laborer - he lets her because he wants to ~get to know her~ without his money coming into it. They meet repeatedly at his cottage and have picnics and fall in love. Then he tells her to go have a Season like the duke/duchess are trying to get her to do and if she's still in love with him in a year to meet back there. Then he goes to London as well and meets her and of course she's angry and thinks he was fooling around with her. He starts pretending to court her not-sister, Claresta, to get near her, and Claresta agrees to help. This is about halfway through and where I put it down. (I should also mention that the Chamberses are a wealthy old family in the vein of the Darcys, but Mrs. Chambers is intent of getting a wife for her son with a courtesy title. This makes little sense. 1. That's not going to do anything for Dillon, he's not going to get a secondary courtesy title of his own. 2. It's not going to do anything for his children, unless he marries an only child whose father's title has nobody else to come to except his son. 3. That would be a worst-case scenario for any nobleman, sorry, men with titles could marry heiresses but noble daughters tended not to marry out of the nobility as they took their husband's status, so did their children, and the title could pass to someone who horrendously worked for a living.)

( wow, this is long )

Just finished The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, if you can call it finishing when you skim from halfway through to the end. Definitely an anti-rec. It can't decide whether it wants to be an old-fashioned swashbuckling Scarlet Pimpernel adventure, a standard romance novel, or a Janet Mullaney-esque modern tongue-in-cheek romance. The adventure made me want to jettison the romance novel clichés even more (STOP FIGHTING ALL THE TIME YOU IDIOTS), and the tongue-in-cheek jokes made me notice the downside of the old-fashioned aspect (no French characters that were helpful or in any way positive). It also seems like kind of a let-down to set it in that short peace between the Reign of Terror and the Napoleonic Wars, just because the Terror is a much more exciting time to be doing daring deeds. So basically, for me it failed to be a fun adventure story because the adventure didn't happen, an interesting love story because the characters were too flat, and a fun semi-parody by taking itself too seriously the majority of the time. The chaperone, Miss Gwen, was so obnoxious to me but the narrative clearly thought she was a spunky older woman ... but I found it annoying that she was a stickler for propriety when it came to the girls but was just rude to anyone she felt like being rude to. Especially Napoleon, who was not short ffs.

Don't even get me started on the framing story with an American scholar coming to Britain to research things, that sort of thing makes me shrivel in embarrassment. Just write a British self-insert, ffs.

Yesterday I splurged and bought Fables: Witches and Rose Red. Bellflower Totenkinder ♥ ♥ I hope she's not gone for good - sure, she walked off into the sunset with that boxer guy, but you can't get rid of anyone in Fables. All those dead characters came back in Haven, after all, and there's too much buildup in this Cult of Blue thing for me to believe Boy Blue is never going to be seen again in any shape or form. Bellflower's not even dead, just going into voluntary retirement. And she's immortal.

Someday I will do Red Riding Hood cosplay. That's how my hair looks now, you know.

Maybe it's just me, though, but I felt like Snow White and Rose Red's backstory wasn't planned out from the beginning. It's like he decided going in that Snow was going to be the lead, and then wanted to wow readers a bit with including Rose since she's much more obscure. And he's been making it clear that Snow is from both SW&RR and SW&7D since early on, but the flashback in Rose Red felt less like, "And now I reveal the elaborate way Snow can be both Snows!" and more, "Oh, gosh, how can I connect these two conflicting stories?"

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Started reading Talk of the Ton, one of the romance novels I picked up at the book sale. It's a collection of four novellas, with the first one by Eloisa James. You know, there's really only one thing she does that annoys me - she gets clothing just right and most mores as well, but she always works on the assumption (that basically all others do as well) that men of the past didn't want to get married, that they'd avoid it unless in love or forced by financial/familial necessity. But that seems very, very presentist to me. It might also come about from people seeing that historical women had few options beyond marriage but men didn't, so making the assumption that men didn't care much about it? From what I can tell, though, men generally did want to get married - generally speaking, it conferred adulthood and respectability, and it meant having someone to take care of your home and make sure things were running smoothly. Which is selfish etc. but I find fairly understandable. I guess it would be harder to plot out novels if the heroes actually did want to get married, though.

Gramma brought these lingerie gowns she had in a closet when she came up for Owen's graduation. They are in such great condition (though a little smelly) - one is definitely my great-grandmother Ardis's high school graduation dress, which would be ca. 1919, I think? and there's a little white baby's dress (with adorable tiny swastikas on the yoke) that was probably hers as well. And then there's another that I think may actually be her mother's - Mertis's. (Yes, their names were Ardis and Mertis. And my grandmother's is Phyllis.) It seems to be ca. 1909 which would be too early for Ardis to have worn it. Must do research!

Adorable piece of R/Hr art, hey.