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The Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal

The Posh, the Privileged and the Paranormal

Tag Archives: Historical Cavaliers

Review of The Girl on the Golden Coin

29 Tuesday Jul 2014

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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book review, girl on the golden coin, Historical Cavaliers, historical fiction, history, seventeenth century, stuarts

I’ve been a little quiet on the blogging front recently, mainly because my wedding is getting ever closer – less than three weeks now – meaning I’m spending far more time looking critically at flowers and cakes than typing merrily away. On the plus side, in an attempt to keep my sanity intact, I’ve been reading loads, and have developed quite the back-log of reviews.

My last post was a list of my planned summer reading, and I described one of the entries on it like this:

“Precisely because I love history so much, I tend to be slightly wary of historical fiction, but from what I hear, this Restoration-era novel about Lady Frances Stewart is both well written and well researched, as well as full of intrigue. And more importantly, the main character marries the son of the real-life Lord George Stewart.”

On that basis, of all the books I’ve read recently, The Girl on the Golden Coin seemed by far the most fitting to review, especially as I read most of during a trip to Oxford to meet with my wedding photographer (who incidentally took some amazing practice shots)

So did the book deliver?

THE GIRL ON THE GOLDEN COIN – MARCI JEFFERSON

THE BLURB

Impoverished and exiled to the French countryside after the overthrow of the English Crown, Frances Stuart survives merely by her blood-relation to the Stuart Royals. But in 1660, the Restoration of Stuart Monarchy in England returns her family to favor. Frances discards threadbare gowns and springs to gilded Fontainebleau Palace, where she soon catches King Louis XIV’s eye. But Frances is no ordinary court beauty, she has Stuart secrets to keep and people to protect. The king turns vengeful when she rejects his offer to become his Official Mistress. He banishes her to England with orders to seduce King Charles II and stop a war.

Armed in pearls and silk, Frances maneuvers through the political turbulence of Whitehall Palace, but still can’t afford to stir a scandal. Her tactic to inspire King Charles to greatness captivates him. He believes her love can make him an honest man and even chooses Frances to pose as Britannia for England’s coins. Frances survives the Great Fire, the Great Plague, and the debauchery of the Restoration Court, yet loses her heart to the very king she must control. Until she is forced to choose between love or war.

On the eve of England’s Glorious Revolution, James II forces Frances to decide whether to remain loyal to her Stuart heritage or, like England, make her stand for Liberty. Her portrait as Britannia is minted on every copper coin. There she remains for generations, an enduring symbol of Britain’s independent spirit and her own struggle for freedom.

 

17934503

MY REVIEW- 3 STARS

I love history, and the Stuart period is a particular favourite of mine – and one that often tends to get neglected by novelists and film makers in favour of the Tudor and Georgian periods that bracket it. Charles II is probably my favourite English King, and I also have a soft spot for Louis XIV and his French court, so this book was really quite an easy sell for me. I was expecting sex, glamour and intrigue – and it’s fair to say it delivered on some of those points and less so on others.

This wasn’t just a general book about the Restoration court. It focussed firmly on the adventures of one woman, Frances Stuart, and as a result, it was always going to stand or fall by a combination of how interesting that character was in real life and how sympathetic and intriguing the author managed to make her. Despite the fact that I used to study history reasonably seriously, I’ve always been far more interested in individuals than in grand, sweeping narratives or battles, so I was all ready for the author to make me develop a massive girl crush of Ms Stuart. Sadly, she mostly didn’t deliver. I went into this book knowing a handful of things about the character – that she’d been a mistress of Charles II, that she was very beautiful and set the fashions of the times, and that she eventually married a character I’d better not name for fear of spoilers (*see footnote), but who I was very interested in hearing more about. By the end of the book, I didn’t feel I’d learnt that much more about her, or forged any kind of real connection.

It’s probably a bit unfair to compare what’s basically a classier than average historical romance with a modern masterpiece, but I couldn’t help contrasting this with my experience of reading Wolf Hall, which also looked at historical events through the eyes of a character who is usually in the background of traditional retellings of the period. By the end of that, I felt that I knew Thomas Cromwell better than my best friends and that I would cheer him on whatever he did. Here, I struggled to get any understanding of Stuart’s motivations or real personality. Did she want to sleep with the French King or was his pursuit stressful and relentless? How about the English King? Who did she want to marry? Her approach to life seemed to vacillate wildly from one moment to the next, and I never knew quite what outcome I should be routing for. To makes matters worse, it was never quite clear what King Charles saw in her apart from her extreme beauty – which is probably quite historically accurate, but makes for a dull read. Throughout, I felt far more interested (and on the verge of cheering for) Frances’ main rival, Lady Castelmaine, who was also beautiful, but who combined it with wit, intelligence and some entertaining scheming.

On the plus side, rooms, clothes and events were lavishly described, and I got a real sense of what life was like for the wealthy and titled in this period. Some of the romance was very sweet and although it was never particularly graphic, some of the sex was really quite hot – indeed it was more interesting because of both the characters’ and the author’s restraint.

The blurb, some of the internet buzz, and the gorgeously classy cover gave me the impression that this was going to be about more than just romance, and that as well as who was sleeping with who, the book would delve into the politics of the time. Despite a few token references to religious conflict and wars, it fundamentally failed to deliver on this point. I haven’t marked it down for this, as it’s no crime for a book not to be quite the genre I was expecting, but if you’re considering whether or not to read this, it’s worth bearing in mind that it is basically just a standard historical romance. Similarly, I disagreed with some of the author’s interpretations of historical events (if you ask me, Louis XIV loved Charles I’s sister, and Frances Stuart loved her eventual husband to the extent she’d defy the king’s wrath to be with him) but again, that hasn’t affected my score – the author had clearly done some research, and part of the fun of history is that people can reach very different conclusions from the same source material.

So, to read or not to read? If you enjoy historical romance and either like the period or are looking for something slightly different, you may well enjoy this. It’s glamorous, sexy and fun, and a fairly easy read. Just don’t expect much from the main character, or much historical context.

*That’s what I wrote in my Goodreads review. I think the not revealing Frances’ eventual husband ship has rather sailed as far as this blog post is concerned, so I’ll just come right out and say I did not like the author’s portrayal of Lord Stewart Junior one little bit, but that’s just because I irrationally wanted him to read like my completely made up portrayal of his father.

 

Stalling for time

17 Thursday Jan 2013

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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boris johnson, Historical Cavaliers, stalling for time, vampires, Van Dyke

In my last post, I promised that this week I’d be writing about just what it is I love about vampire novels. Now normally, posting delays mean either writer’s block or a lack of time to write. In this case, it’s neither.

I sat down to write a short, fun piece, and suddenly, thoughts and ideas and connections began streaming out of me, and I found myself with a several thousand word essay, which still doesn’t quite say everything I want to say.

So rather than quickly putting up something that’s a)far to long, b)a bit of a stream of consciousness, and c) not quite finished, I’m going to polish it up over the weekend, and then either edit it down to sensible blog length, or more likely, because I think it would be quite fun, post a part of it each evening next week as a little series.

In the meantime, as treat, apology and procrastination, for those of you who like my series for it’s historical aspects, here’s a picture of a lovely Cavalier, James Stewart, Duke of Richmond and Lennox. For those of you who like the posh Oxford bits, here’s a young Boris Johnson all dressed up and holding champagne  Is it wrong of me to think that our beloved mayor was quite ridiculously hot in his early twenties?!

lord james boris

 

Red hair, green dresses, and sheep – Pre-Raphaelite Fun-Times

22 Saturday Sep 2012

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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Art, Historical Cavaliers

It’s been a really rather arty week. After treating myself to the Van Dyke book a few days ago, today I went to the Pre-Raphaelites exhibition at Tate Britain. I’d really recommend it if you’re looking for a quick dose of culture. Many of the paintings are lovely to look at and don’t require much background knowledge or effort to appreciate. I always feel so virtuous when I’ve done something like that, rather than just going to a bar. It’s a bit like going to the gym, only actually fun.

I’m not a massive fan of the Pre-Raphaelites, but they certainly have both some interesting life stories and some pretty pictures.

Things I’ve learnt about the Pre-Raphaelites from this exhibition:

  • They really like women with red hair, seemingly to the point of a fetish.
  • They seem to like painting these redheads whilst they are wearing green dresses. To be fair, that’s a good look. In my teens I used to dye my hair red all the time and green clothes looked awesome with it.
  • They really like Tennyson. A good quarter of the paintings seemed to be at least loosely based on Tennyson poems. Again, I’m right there with them on that. Tennyson is one of my absolute favourite poets. When I was going through a bit of an emo phase years ago, his poems were better than anything My Chemical Romance could come up with for quoting in an artfully depressed way. I can still recite several of them even now my hormones have levelled out.
  • They seem to have a bit of an obsession with sheep. One painting is beautifully entitled, “The Pretty Baa Lambs,” (the Ronseal of artwork nomenclature), but there seemed to be sheep (and occasionally, for a change of pace, goats) cropping up in the oddest pictures. I’ve nothing against sheep, but they’ve rather lost me on that one.
  • They had a bit of a thing for wife-swapping. Not in the fun “let’s all put our car keys in a bowl” seventies style thing, but a more melodramatic Victorian version, in which they keep tragically abandoning one woman in order to steal their best friend’s wife.
  • A disproportionate amount of their paintings are about death and doomed love, be it from history, mythology, literature or their own lives.

Unlike Van Dyke, who is entirely relevant to my novels, the PRB (as they liked to call themselves, like some kind of rap collective) are a bit of a stretch, so to justify this post, here are some pictures from the exhibition that sort of relate to the series:

This one’s called the Wounded Cavalier, which rather speaks for itself. Oh no! Damn you sinister Roundhead onlooker.


This is a painting of Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Roundheads. (My civil war tutor at Oxford is crying at that over-simplified statement). As you might have gathered, I’m fairly partisan on the subject of the English Civil War, and I bloody hate Cromwell. Ford Madox Brown, the painter of this work, seems to disagree. (PS. See what I mean about the sheep?!)

This is one of my absolute favourites. It’s just so beautiful. It’s a painting of Lilith, by Dante Gabrielle Rossetti. In some traditions, Lilith was the first wife of Adam, before Eve came on the scene. In vampire mythology, she’s sometimes regarded as the mother of all vampires. When I called Harriet’s college Lilith College (which is entirely made up), it was her I was thinking of when I named it. In Book Two, there is a character who sometimes goes by the name of Lilith, and who despite her beauty and ancient power, is the nominal leader of the Roundheads. I wasn’t conscious of having seen this picture before today, but I think I must have, because this is exactly how I visualise my character. (She’s got the red hair, sadly she isn’t wearing a green dress, but I promise at least half the women were).

And finally, because if there’s one thing I like, it’s attractive historical figures, here’s a fairly cute (if rather arrogant looking) portrait of Rossetti:

If you fancy taking a look yourself, the details are here: http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/pre-raphaelites-victorian-avant-garde

Van Dyke’s Cavalier Paintings

18 Tuesday Sep 2012

Posted by georgianaderwent in Uncategorized

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Tags

Art, Charity Shopping, Historical Cavaliers, Van Dyke

I absolutely love and adore charity shops. In fact, in intend to write a post on that at some point. One of the great things about them is that you never know what you’re going to find. Usually when I have an exciting charity shop discovery it’s a gorgeous dress or some gloriously impractical shoes, but today, it was a book.  (Well, I also got some rather nice Armani jeans, but that’s not the point of the story).

That’s right, it’s a huge book filled with paintings by Van Dyke. One of the things I miss about Oxford is being surrounded by beautiful books. My degree was History, but a large proportion of my modules were on Art History, probably the best way of making a notoriously impractical degree that little bit less practical, but making you an invaluable companion on trips round art galleries.

I firmly believe that there are few better ways of understanding a historical period than through it’s art and its literature, and that’s particularly true for the seventeenth century. Van Dyke is a painter I studied in detail and he’s one of my favourites. He mainly painted portraits, and they both beautiful to look as and seem to give a real insight into the character of the sitter. I’ve wanted copies of lots of his paintings for ages, and now I have them.  You may be wondering why any of this is relevant to the blog. The answer is quite simple. If there was one thing Van Dyke liked painting, it was Cavaliers. Most of Charles I’s court sat for him just before the Civil War. The paintings are in many cases tinged with sadness, as large numbers of the happy, glamorous young men, mainly in their late teens and early twenties, died in the war just a few years later.

Here are some of my favourites. If you don’t know what Cavaliers look like, scroll down to find out, and you’ll see why I love them so much.

What I really need is an actor who looks like this

The book is great because next to each portrait, it provides a fairly detailed biography of the sitter. After slowly having my enthusiasm sucked out of me by proofreading Oxford Blood, this has reminded me that the point of my book isn’t commas, it’s attractive historical men!

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