Scandalous Women in Historical Romance
Today’s guest post comes to us from award-winning historical nonfiction author Elizabeth Kerri Mahon, who launched Scandalous Women, a blog dedicated to exploring history’s boldest ladies, in 2007. The popular blog eventually led to her 2011 paperback release, Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History’s Most Notorious Women. Here, Elizabeth talks a little about the scandalous women of historical romance!
They say that good girls go to heaven but bad girls go everywhere, and nowhere is that more true than in historical romance. Scandalous women are now everywhere! Where once readers had to look to historical fiction or contemporary romance for more diverse heroines, more and more historical romances are featuring heroines who are not the virgin widow, the governess, the wallflower or the young miss about to have her first London season.
Go into any bookstore and peruse the romance section, and one can find novels featuring courtesans as heroines — something that would have been unthinkable five or ten years ago. And it’s not just courtesans but heroines who, gasp, didn’t wait for a ring on their finger before they invited the hero into their boudoir. More and more writers are pushing the envelope, exploring women’s lives beyond business as usual. Heroines in historical romance can even own their own business or pursue an interest in science or the arts as a profession and not just a hobby. Cara Elliott’s Circle of Sin trilogy features a trio of brainy scientists. These heroines are gals who exhibit guts and gumption, whether they are out hunting vampires or hunting for a husband at Almack’s. Scandalous women in romance are not passive; they don’t follow the rules, they go around them. Her choices can sometimes get her into trouble, but she doesn’t need the hero to rescue her, sometimes she rescues him!
Margaret Mitchell certainly understood the appeal of the scandalous woman. Scarlett O’Hara in Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, is the grand dame of scandalous women. Scarlett married three times, neglected her children and spent most of the book in love with another woman’s husband, but readers couldn’t get enough of her. Scarlett’s unbridled and tempestuous personality might be tamed by Rhett Butler but never mastered. Then there was Amber, the heroine of Kathleen Winsor’s blockbuster 1944 novel Forever Amber. Set during the Restoration, Forever Amber follows the formula of Gone with the Wind. Amber St. Clare makes her way up through the ranks of society by sleeping with and/or marrying successively richer and more important men, while keeping her love for the one man she could never have. The 1970s and ’80s, sometimes called the ‘golden age’ of historical romance was filled with scandalous women. In Jennifer Wilde’s 1978 novel Dare to Love, Wilde based the heroine Elena Lopes on Victorian bad girl Lola Montez, who danced her way through three continents and into the beds of Franz Liszt and King Ludwig I of Bavaria.
What is it about scandalous women that sends authors to the keyboards and readers to the bookstores? “I tend to write offbeat, unconventional heroines. I’m not quite sure why I’m attracted to quirky characters — maybe because I tended to be a tomboy as a child and was often chided to ‘act more like a normal young lady!’ ” says Cara Elliott.
Author Anna Campbell (Claiming the Courtesan) certainly agrees. “Heroines in historical romance now cover the full gamut of female experience,” she says. “As well as virgin debutantes and virtuous governesses, there are scandalous widows and courtesans who decide to risk their heart in one last love affair. Women in the 21st century relate to strong heroines, whatever their background or range of sexual experience. And sometimes that strength is honed in scandal.”
For some authors, it’s the real life historical scandalous women who provide the inspiration. “The inspiration for my series came from reading about the real-life exploits of women in the Regency period and realizing that so many of them lived lives that were outside the conventional box,” says author Nicola Cornick, RITA nominated for One Wicked Sin, the second in her Scandalous Women of the Ton series. “I enjoyed reading about the women who blazed a trail in scandalous ways, and I wanted to explore these ideas in my series.”
However all has not been hearts and flowers for these authors. Some readers have complained that the novels are not true to the history of the period. “I’ve been scolded in the past for not creating ‘real’ Regency ladies, but I beg to disagree — albeit politely,” smiles Elliott. “The more I research the Regency era, the more I discover what fascinating and adventurous women lived during that era.”
While some readers may still prefer a tamer, more traditional heroine, scandalous women are here to stay!
