Sherwood Smith | Updates

Reading Order of the Sartorias-deles Series

Sherwood Smith — Thu, 24 Apr 2025 20:07:53 -0400

What's the Reading Order for the Sartorias-deles Series?

That seems a simple question, but it's not simple to answer when one has been writing a long, interconnected story all one's life. I started writing in this world as a child, so the early stories are kids' adventure stories from a kid's POV. But when I reached my teens, I began playing around with why this or that happened, or how things got the way they were, reaching for connections beyond the immediate, including back in history. Originally, INDA was going to be pretty much a kids' story at the academy, for ex.

The storyline grew up with me. But I couldn't just dump the early stuff because everything interrelates.

Many readers don't want to read the kids' stories, but they hit A SWORD NAMED TRUTH and feel they've been plopped into the middle of a series. Which, *kaff* they have.

To get up to speed, my suggestion is to read SPY PRINCESS (and perhaps its sequel SARTOR). Both are from a kid POV but touch on world events; POOR WORLD, which again, is from a kid POV, but again leads straight into world events, and SENRID, which introduces one of the most important characters of the entire saga. If you can't stand Kyale's voice at the beginning of SENRID, skip to the second part; this one is actually four novelettes/novellas centered around Senrid. A STRANGER TO COMMAND next, and FLEEING PEACE, the last of the stories from the kids'-eye view as they are thrown into world events. After that, A SWORD NAMED TRUTH might make a whole lot more sense.

That said, here is a list of all the Sartorias-deles stories in timeline order. They are grouped in arcs:

HISTORICAL ARC

"Lily and Crown"
Inda
The Fox
King's Shield
Treason's Shore
Time of Daughters (two volumes)
Banner of the Damned

MODERN ERA

CHILDREN'S STORIES, (written when I was a kid) which introduce many of the characters central to later arcs.

CJ Notebooks
Senrid
Spy Princess
Sartor
Fleeing Peace
A Stranger to Command

ROMANCES

(they mostly stand alone):

Crown Duel
The Trouble with Kings
Sasharia En Garde

RISE OF THE ALLIANCE

A Sword Named Truth
The Blood Mage Texts
The Hunters and the Hunted
Nightside of the Sun

The Wicked Skill

THE NORSUNDER WAR

Ship Without Sails
Marend of Marloven Hess
Seek to Hold the Wind
All Things Betray
A Chain of Braided Silver

POST-WAR

Let the Torrent Dance Thee Down
Antiphony
"Beauty" published in REMALNA STORIES
"Court Ship" published in REMALNA STORIES

Masques
[to come: Spark Royal]

"The Art of Masks"

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Extra Stuff for the Inda Series

Sherwood Smith — Tue, 06 May 2025 19:26:02 -0400

"Character List for Inda"

Characters and Ships in THE FOX"

Characters list for THE KING'S SHIELD

This is how I 'hear' the names pronounced

Glossary for the worldbuilding nerd, or detail about the world, its history, its paradigm.

General timeline

A detailed map of the portions of the world in Inda's story. (PDF version here, a very LARGE file).

The map of Marloven Hesea made it into the print edition of BANNER OF THE DAMNED but not the map of COLEND

Some stuff about the ships at this time in the southern hemisphere of Inda's world.

What Happened After TREASON'S SHORE

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A Rant in Defense of Fantasy Castles, Cloaks, Kings, and Cooking

Sherwood Smith — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:51:35 -0400

A counterblast to those fantasy-haters who use A Tough Guide as their stick to lambast

A few years back, in the Critters Writing Workshop Discussion newsgroup on SFF.NET, we were talking about fantasy, and what sells, and why, and what we want to write. Some fantasy writers are defensive after the excellent and very funny skewering Diana Wynne Jones gave the unthought cliches of the fantasy genre in her A TOUGH GUIDE TO FANTASY. Heck, I have my own, much older, satire in my Henchminions story elsewhere on this website. But Jones isn’t against fantasy—she writes it!—What she pillories are old tropes that are used without much thought, and I maintain that if we think about what in those same tropes we love, and why we love them, then maybe as writers we’ll find ways to make them fresh—and as readers we’ll find writers who them fresh for us.

Well, here’s the rant.

Judging from the sales, it’s obvious that readers really like all those old quasi-medieval tropes. Are these readers all drooling trolls whose idea of haute cuisine is Velveeta on Rye-Crisp and whose idea of landscaping is to park the rotting ’68 Impala on the front lawn next to the rusting Kelvinator?

Here are some of my own observations on the audience for those books.

1. Young readers. We sometimes forget, we who have been reading reams of print for decades, that we too began enthusiastic reading with something that seemed to us new —and that some of our first favorites were, um, not exactly Nobel Prize Winners. Everything is new to each new reader. Thus, the most tired Tolkien-clone is going to be fresh and exciting to a fourteen year old who craves a story about an ordinary kid who ends up, after adventures full of wonder and sorrow, as king, or a plucky orphan who Impresses a horse/dragon/cat/wolf/whatever creature, or finds a magic weapon or ring…who longs for glimpses Beyond the Fields We Know. The distant echo of what drew Tolkien out of his abstruse linguistic studies to fashion a world whose greatness was ending—just as Tolkien’s own world was ending— still resonates in those books, judging from the eager responses of my high school students. And I say, good for them!

2. Older readers. There are older readers who buy these books for escapist reading. Escapist reading has been a subject of debate ever since the first flamewars in Spectator. (I have one issue from the early 1700s wherein the current taste in trash novels is pilloried by the writers.) Charlotte Lennox in her A Female Quixote lambastes young ladies ‘educating’ themselves on romances in, what, 1742? Jane Austen’s juvenilia pokes enthusiastic fun at the novels (making it clear that she devoured reams of them first—probably just as enthusiastically) ending with her brilliant panegyric on her sister authors in the beginning of Northanger Abbey—which in itself is a gentle satire of the Gothick Novel.

The main ingredients of escapist reading across all genres, going right back to those early ones, are recognizable characters, situations, and stories—what critics sneeringly call the mimetic or phatic.

My handy-dandy collegiate Webster’s defines ‘phatic’ as revealing or sharing feelings or establishing an atmosphere of sociability rather than communicating ideas. Phatic discourse when applied to everyday life refers to those meaningless phrases like “How are ya?” that no one really listens to. Such phrases serve to open communication. When applied to literature, it can refer to tropes used over and over again in order to instantly cue the reader to an effect, or an emotion that the author wants the reader to feel: some have likened these tropes to the laugh track on a sitcom in order to let you know you’re supposed to laugh. Mimetic means mimicry, and it’s another way of coming at tropes that have become common—like dragon-riders and impressment, or handsome and sexy vampires who never seem to have death breath, though all they drink is blood. The third term used is the dismissive ‘cliche.’

Unless we’re a middle schooler just discovering fantasy we instantly recognize that doughty young farmboy who defends the village children against a troll, using only his pitchfork, or the gamine-faced young thief whose slanting green eyes and high cheekbones promise great beauty when she does finally take a bath (somewhere after meeting the handsome prince, or bard, who will elevate her to the style to which she wishes to become accustomed). We recognize the Dark Lord as soon as he sacrifices some hapless villagers, or orders his Army of Night into yet another kingdom to conquer once-happy peasants and enlightened rulers. Those elements have become comfortably familiar plotlines: those of us who like to read about the seemingless helpless taking charge of their lives, and the seemingly powerful getting their just desserts, will try to seek characters who aren’t quite cardboard cutouts of the ones we’ve seen so many times before. We’re looking for a fresh blend of the familiar elements, so we can live the story along with our hero who learns to take action. We know that action will actually be effective in the end, that honor means something even in this little scrap of a world, that justice is a concept that brings peace. Where some postmodernists will slam this theme for its political agenda and bourgeouis values, other reader s might only see a social and emotional bond beneath notions of harmony and order.

I like writing about castles, and preindustrial societies. I like cloaks, and stylish gowns. I like duels with steel. I like battles of wits, and I prefer violence to be stylized— swashbuckling—a bit like cartoons, where the bad guys mowed down never seem real, and where there might be deaths but there is no protracted pain and suffering. At my age, I know the difference. I like archetypal characters who display believable personality traits of the sort I see in people around me. I can believe in an awesome Gandalf-like wizard if he reminds me just a little of my Uncle Joe.

I don’t read books about meaningless misery, and I don’t write them. What I like to write is, I know, another person’s cliche, because I love the old-fashioned story in which honor and justice and mercy can win.

I like to think of those tropes in the way I see a sonnet. The sonnet form isn’t going to change. Those 14 lines, and the rhyme scheme, are the rules. But what you say within those limits can, if done right, resonate right down through the centuries to readers whose lives I otherwise would scarcely comprehend—i.e., just like Shakespeare has done for us. That other sonneteers aren’t remembered does not mean that the sonnet form is creatively bankrupt. No, it means that Shakespeare’s are rare gifts.

For a couple of hours there are no fruitless searches for weapons of mass destruction, no child molestors, no cancer, no drunks wiping out whole families on the road at night. No Columbine School re-enactments, with children wiping out other children. We know how the story is going to go, and for a little time, the world makes sense, and right wins because there is justice and mercy and order in the universe.

So next week we might cruise by B&N after a dreary day at work, and there’s a new fantasy, featuring a new doughty character who learns to square up against the powerful—and win. Well, why not? Better than watching the news.

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Romance of the Regency: Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, and Silver Fork Novels

Sherwood Smith — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:45:48 -0400

I discovered Georgette Heyer in high school, after reading an entire issue of the fanzine Niekas devoted to it, somewhere around 1967-8. At that time I hadn’t yet read Jane Austen, though I’d loved historical novels ever since I checked out Mara, Daughter of the Nile in grade school. My favorite by ninth grade was Annemarie Selinko’s Desiree, based on real people during the Napoleonic period (though I was to discover it was every bit as romanticized as most of the memoirs penned by the surviving principals later on) so I was instantly intrigued.

The first Heyer I read was A Convenient Marriage, and as Horry was a couple years older than I (she was all of seventeen) I had no problem with her romancing a world-weary Earl in his mid-thirties. Seventeen was so old and sophisticated! But the real draw was the entrancingly complicated world building, which scratched much of the same itch that drew me to SF and F, even though there was no magic in those books.

From then on I had to read them all. My library only had four or five, so for several weeks I walked the three miles to the stop for the downtown bus, which was almost a two hour ride one way, to check the Los Angeles Main Library, where I found a gold mine—they had everything, even the ones she later suppressed (though I could immediately see why, young as I was).

I was thoroughly entranced.

When I was done with those, I looked around for anything like them, encountering (as did many of my agemates) Barbara Cartland, then Clare Darcy, and others. Regency romances took off in the wake of Heyer’s popularity, which zoomed when her books began to appear here in the States in paperback. Those seventies Regency romance writers seemed to be doing their research in Heyer’s novels, often not only reproducing her plotlines, her character types and dialogue patterns, specifically the slang. It got so that when the young heroine admonished her best friend, or her scamp of a brother, or a tall, sardonic handsome hero not to make a cake of themselves, you knew a Heyer plot was coming. The question was, which one?

In college I discovered Jane Austen, and it was as if a door had opened where before I’d had a peephole. I devoured those novels, I devoured her letters, then I devoured all the novels she must have read, and the plays, and publications like Spectator, and moved on to collections of letters and diaries. When I came back to Heyer, which I often did as a comfort read, I began to perceive the differences not just in dialogue, but in paradigm.

The Regency Monde

Gradually I worked past Austen’s era, and discovered that the Regency bucks, beaux, and dangerous ladies became objects of fascination in the 1830s, in spite of Lady Blessington’s interview with Byron, who by that time had been away from England so long she found him quaint and slightly peculiar in his old-fashioned Bond Street beau clothes and his out-of-date idiom.

There is something about the Regency period that has remained fascinating down to today. Such events as the Cyprians’ Ball of 1818 could take place, at which people of high degree mixed with low, capturing the imagination with a bewitching mix of arrogance, raffishness, style, and glamor. The London of high society during the Regency was graced by buildings and furnishings of brilliant artistry, without being scarred (unlike Paris and the rest of Europe) by twenty years of war. High society during this period was looser than the days of stiff crinolines and satin coats, yet language was somehow more refined: by 1818, ‘mistresses’ or ‘women on the town’ (such as was mentioned in Pride and Prejudice) were ‘tender connexions’ and ‘Cyprians’, words like ‘bowels’ and ‘cholic’ were no longer acceptable in the drawing room, and women were no longer ‘breeding’ but ‘in the family way.’ This refinement was not so much of moral nicety as of social boundary. Above all, the time was filled with remarkable personalities, captured not only in various romans à clef, but in the anecdotes of Captain Gronow and others.

One of these personalities was Lady Caroline Lamb, who penned a roman à clef of her own, called Glenarvon, in which she enthusiastically skewers every one of the high ranking people she knew personally, to their gasping dismay and fulminating rage when the book came out—and sold out. Her chief target was Lord Byron, with whom she’d had an affair as brief as it was stormy. The novel includes his last letter to her, a high-handedly pointed effusion making it crystal clear she was being dumped. Harriette Wilson insists she discussed this letter with Byron, and he said he deliberately made all those letters as ridiculous and melodramatic as possible. Maybe it’s even true!

In Glenarvon, Lady Caro gleefully inserted herself as a classic Mary Sue not once but twice, first as the helpless innocent with whom everyone is in love, and so who gets to die a tragic and beautiful death of consumption, throwing the world into mourning, and also as the Byronically tragic female war leader, who gets a Byronically dramatic death as she rides off a cliff. (Modern audiences will feel sorry for the horse.)

Silver Fork Novels

The thing to remember is that Jane Austen was not writing Regency novels as we understand them today. She was writing contemporary novels of manners (with a dose of satire), sometimes revised to be up-to-the-minute. The Regency historical novel focusing on the glamorous life came later; I think it was a fashion launched by a young Bulwer-Lytton in his ultra-glam and self-consciously, archly witty Pelham in 1828, described below. After its extreme popularity, the genre was launched by publisher Henry Colburn, who made his name in publishing by instituting such well-known works as Burke’s Peerage. He made a killing in fiction by schmoozing bored aristocrats and aristocratic wannabes into writing novels, which were snapped up by a fascinated middle class, who devoured such books almost as much as they devoured books about thieves, highwaymen, and the underworld.

Since in those days most novels, especially by women, were published anonymously, he just had to let gossip get out that someone “high” was coming out with a roman à clef. Not only was that an assured sell for the middle classes, but it also assured sales among the beau monde who wanted to see who was caricatured in it—after they made sure their own name wasn’t there, either in easily penetrated cipher, or by the coy em-dash, as in Duchess of D——e.

Propelling taste for insider info on the high life was courtesan Harriette Wilson’s memoirs, published after she systematically blackmailed all her former clients, saying “Pay up or I’ll put you in a book.” When Wellington, among others, said “Publish and be damned,” she was as good as her word. Those memoirs are entertaining now, though hardly what modern audiences would consider scandalous. Like all lady memoirists of the time, Harriette strove to present herself as ever young, frail, largely innocent, and of course of impeccable ton.

Lady Charlotte Bury, Henry Luttrell, Lord Normanby, Robert Plumer Ward, and T.H. Lister were among Colburn’s lofty authors, and Theodore Hook and Benjamin Disraeli among the wannabes. Hook’s lavish, admiring descriptions of dinners among the high and mighty prompted a critic to mock him, giving birth to the “silver fork” label; Thackeray later lambasted Bulwer-Lytton’s penchant for lionizing high society, calling him a “silver fork polisher.” His Vanity Fair was the ultimate anti-silver forker.

Silver fork novels might contain an element of satire—there were two novels about Almacks, both called Almacks, castigating it as nothing but a marriage mart for aristocrats-—but underneath the caricatures was a sustained and unquestioning admiration for birth, riches, and exclusivity. The most risible satire is bestowed on instances of mauvais ton; otherwise, authors hadn’t a thing to say against flagrant consumption, as long as it was done with style.

Country house parties, risqué behavior, gambling, and duels filled the pages, though central was always an edifyingly “good” heroine and if the young hero began his life with careless abandon, he was sure to repent just enough to marry and settle down by the end of his three volumes. It is true that there were exceptions. Lady Charlotte Bury, in A Marriage in High Life, sees to it that the immoral Lord Fitzheury, who marries a banker’s daughter and then rejects her on her wedding night in favor of his mistress, dies of consumption after too late recognizing his wife’s purity.

But none of these reached the pinnacle of popularity of Edward Lytton Bulwer’s Pelham, the Adventures of a Gentleman. In the first chapter, Henry Pelham’s mother is about to run away with her lover, the most popular rake in London, when she flits back to get her overlooked china dog. There she meets her husband on the stairs.

“I have observed,” (says Henry Pelham), “that the distinguishing trait of people accustomed to good society, is a calm imperturbable quiet, which pervades all their actions and habits, from the greatest to the least; they eat in quiet, move in quiet, live in quiet, and lose their wife, or even their money in quiet; while low persons cannot take up either a spoon or an affront without making such an amazing noise about it.”

The couple carry on as if nothing happened, except that Mr. Pelham senior introduces the rake to Brooke’s Club, and invites him twice weekly to dinner for a year.

People nowadays who have only heard of Bulwer (or Bulwer-Lytton, as he soon styled himself, acknowledging his mother’s wishes) via the contest for the worst opening sentence, assume that he was a terrible writer. Bulwer-Lytton was actually extremely popular throughout the nineteenth century, and had far more influence than one might think.

His influence begins with this novel. In a move that I suspect was influenced by Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, Bulwer has Henry Pelham’s stylish mother tell Henry in an impishly Chesterfieldian letter that he looks better in black than blue. Henry (who of course has the ideal slender, aristocratic physique) instructs his valet from now on he will wear black coats day and night, and without any padding. Thus, the Regency tight, padded blue coat with its golden buttons, made fashionable by Beau Brummel, overnight became outmoded. For pretty much the next hundred years, men wore black coats for formal wear, and without padding.

It took me many years to get a copy of the 1828 edition, which he later smoothed a bit to make it more family friendly, when he rebranded himself as a writer of great fiction. And his contemporaries considered him a great—in his autobiography, Anthony Trollope discusses the prominent writers of his day. Bulwer is fourth after Thackeray, Elliott, and Dickens, and before Charlotte Bronte, Wilkie Collins, and others.

In his early twenties, full of wit and eagerness to please the great hostesses of the day (early in the novel there is plenty of praise for Lady Caroline Lamb, one of the hostesses who launched Bulwer into society), Bulwer set out to make a name for himself. And he did, with his insouciant wit that must have been an influence on Oscar Wilde:

“There was also Mr. Wormwood, the noli-metangere of literary lions—an author who sowed his conversation not with flowers but thorns . . .he had never once been known to say a civil thing. He was too much disliked not to be recherché; whatever is once notorious, even for being disagreeable, is sure to be courted in England.”

And this famous line, spoken by the Brummel character whom Pelham meets, “Give me the man who makes the tailor, not the tailor who makes the man.” Georgette Heyer later made use of this line.

Shortly after Bulwer hit the bigtime, the silver fork novel reached its pinnacle with the works of Catherine Grace Gore, in which high life was brilliantly mixed with wit and an eye to complexity of character, and sympathy for women trying to make a place in the dangerous world of what by then became known as the haut ton. Silver fork novels continued to be popular, though later in the century, writers shifted them up to contemporary times. A couple of examples are E.F. Benson’s Dodo and Anthony Hope’s Dolly Dialogues.

I don’t think Jeffrey Farnol fits into the silver fork tradition except at the edge, but he was definitely an influence on Heyer with his adventurous historical novels. Finally, I think Nancy Mitford’s work is in the silver fork tradition, glorifying the lifestyle of the Bright Young Things, which is another influence I see in Heyer’s work.

So when Heyer began zeroing in on the Regency period, I think she took all these influences and reinvented the silver fork tradition. I don’t know if anyone else sees the connection; one of the reasons why I write these riffs is to check my ideas against others’ perceptions. But when I went back after some years of reading all these novels, I was struck by a resemblance between Mitford’s work and Heyer’s, specifically the cadences of language, and the outlook: Mitford wrote about Bright Young Things with the charm one remembers of one’s youth. Heyer wrote about them with the charm of one who admired that life, only she sets them in Regency garb, and gives them Regency era slang instead of the distinctive twenties “too-too sick-making” idiom. But, like twenties Bright Young Women, Heyer’s heroines show a tendency to use male slang, specifically that from Pierce Egan’s popular works, which you don’t actually find much of in Austen or her contemporaries. They also show the twenties freedom from constraint, though they are still ladies of birth and breeding.

In Austen’s Northanger Abbey the Thorpe sisters speak in female idiom, which is quite different from that employed by the Thorpe brother. The latter uses a few terms familiar from Pierce Egan’s work, and Austen shares her contemporaries’ disgust for the habits of some teenage boys of otherwise good birth who loved acting like coachmen, boxing the watch, and behaving like ruffians. In Heyer’s novels, the younger brothers take this behavior sometimes to an extreme degree while remaining lovable, like the wild young men of the Bright Young Things; also during the twenties, young women of birth adopted male dress, and male habits like short hair, smoking, driving, the wearing of trousers, and young men of their class found that attractive. Heyer’s heroes seem to find male slang and outlook attractive in her heroines, though in Austen’s contemporaries, females behaving similarly are universally made fun of. (Austen writes about all kinds of women, but none ever drive a perch-phaeton, fire off a pistol, or dress in breeches.)

Ton: Austen vs. Heyer

Whether or not my theory about Bright Young Things holds any water, the element that truly places Heyer firmly among the silver fork novelists is her persistent theme that Blood Will Always Tell. This is very much in the silver fork tradition, going right back to Pelham. Though one could call Bulwer’s witty prose Austenian at times, I think Jane Austen would have objected to the matter-of-fact way that the narrator ridicules his host, while accepting his generous invitation, in a passage like:

“Sir Lionel Garret was a character very common in England, and, in describing him, I describe the whole species . . . It was no wonder, then, that to this set belonged Sir Lionel Garrett . . . pinched in, and curled out—abounding in horses and whiskers—dancing all night—lounging all day—the favourite of the old ladies, the Philander of the young . . . He cared not a straw that he was a man of fortune, of family, of consequence; he must be a man of ton; or he was an atom, a nonentity, a very worm, and no man. No lawyer at Gray’s Inn, no galley slave at the oar, ever worked so hard at his task, as Sir Lionel Garrett at his.”

Pelham then goes on to ridicule the company that he will triumph over with his social finesse. Austen would have despised such hypocrisy. The only two aristocrats she presents in a good light are Mr. Darcy (not Lord; he is the nephew of an earl through his mother) and his cousin, Col. Fitzwilliam, the latter being the earl’s youngest son who must follow a profession. We know how Darcy has to change before the daughter of a country gentleman will agree to marry him. Without exception, the rest of Austen’s aristocrats are stupid, vulgar, boring, and arrogant. Heyer reserves that kind of opprobrium for social climbers.

I think that Heyer’s Bright Young Things in Regency dress succeed so well because they bridge the gap between the Regency paradigm and that of the twentieth century. I just don’t see any of Heyer’s favorite heroine types in the actual Regency, though there are some shared traits. For an example of the most radical Regency young women—the closest to modern times—one might turn to Claire Claremont’s journal or letters. She doesn’t even remotely talk or behave like a Heyer heroine. Even less does Mary Shelley. Reading their journals, one is struck by how much female attitudes have changed in 200 years.

Heyer’s great strength is her plotting and humor, but her characters are pretty much types (she even admitted it, calling her heroes Mark I and Mark II) with superficial differences. They seldom have depth: her attempt at a ‘serious’ Regency, including middle-class people (A Civil Contract) reads (at least to me, though I know many readers disagree) like melodrama, with a lot of just the sort of ranting that Austen pillories in a couple of her books.

That is the most telling difference between Heyer and Austen for me: Austen disliked tonnish behavior. She certainly knew the word, but in all her novels she uses it just once, in chapter nine of Mansfield Park, when the tonnish Mary Crawford is twitting Edmund Bertram on his determination to become a clergyman. Miss Crawford says such men are nothing. Bertram retorts that they are hardly nothing, though “A clergyman cannot be high in state or fashion. He must not head mobs, or set the ton in dress.”

Here, as in Bulwer-Lytton’s work, and indeed, most letters and literature of the actual Regency period, ton means ‘tone,’ or style. Heyer’s novels refer to the haut ton, a noun comprising her upper ten thousand, a change in the meaning of ton that I don’t see widely adopted until well into the silver fork period.

Jane Austen is accepted as a genius. Is Georgette Heyer a genius? If she is, it is a different kind than Austen’s. I think Heyer’s genius was in successfully creating an alternate Regency that is the epitome of the silver fork novel, that skillfully blends past with present so that character, story, and even paradigm are easily accessible to a modern audience.

Heyer was a meticulous researcher, immersing herself in literature of the period, down to every detail of dress, something again that you do not find in Austen, who, in writing about her own time, assumes that everyone knows those details. There are few hints about clothing in Austen’s novels, outside of Fanny being complimented on her white gown with the glossy spots in Mansfield Park. Heyer gets rid of what she doesn’t like about that period, and gives her reader what makes Jane Austen so popular for so many readers: the agreeable life of the upper reaches of society, the tranquil existence that never sees the horror and anguish and squalor of the manufacturing cities, the mines, and the lives of the poor.

Heyer created the ideal Regency haut ton—that is, ideal for aristocrats. When she does permit the ugliness of early industrial life and the grinding misery of the poor to enter a novel (Arabella), or the nastiness of economic underpinnings (any book that mentions Jews) she wisely confines it to single instances that she can have her heroine or hero solve, then she whisks the evidence out of the way so that the reader stays firmly in her secondary universe, and does not start thinking about the tragedies of reality.

Heyer’s reinvention of the silver fork novel was so convincing, enchanting, and pervasive that Regency romance readers for many years expected the plots to follow the same general lines as Heyer laid down, the characters to resemble her types, and Heyer’s distinctive slang to be faithfully reproduced. And it is still pretty much the case. Readers who love Heyer’s novels know that there can never be any new ones, and so they turn to authors who write similar books in order to extend the pleasure they find in the originals.

Besides discussion among those who know Heyer, Austen, and the period, I hope this riff might spark an interest in the real Jane Austen and her contemporaries, if one has enjoyed the various Austen-related movies and mashups. Jane Austen invented the modern novel, by quietly but effectively breaking through the eighteenth century stereotypes and writing about real people, with real reactions, with insight, and wit. If a person has read enough Heyer and others who emulate her, he or she ought not to find Austen’s language impenetrable, and will probably be able to comprehend the wit. Anyone who loves, say, Friday’s Child ought to laugh out loud at the absurdities of Mrs. Norris, or enjoy the sly selfishness of Isabella Thorpe—or recognize how John Dashwood, so continually worried about his position in society, becomes more servile than his servants.

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Autre Pays, Autre Merde: Rereading the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O’Brian

Sherwood Smith — Thu, 01 May 2025 17:38:42 -0400

(spoilers ahoy)

Mentions of Patrick O’Brian’s historical novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin entered my awareness through an astonishing variety of venues—from the online Rec Arts Science Fiction newsgroup to my mother-in-law’s dining table.

I read the beginning of Reverse of the Medal in a bookstore once, but there was too much a feeling of in medias res to engage me. In subsequent discussions readers repeatedly insisted that one must begin with the first volume, Master and Commander.

I borrowed the first five from my mother-in-law, and a couple hours later, I was hooked. By the third book, specifically the Dil chapter, I was reading with white heat intensity. And I’ve reread them two or three times since; recently I listened to the entire series on audiobook while getting in my daily steps.

Ah Tutti Contenti Saremo Cosi

What makes them work so well? First, O’Brian’s series is not twenty episodic novels. They are all one story, a roman fleuvecomposed of intersecting arcs. By ignoring the episodic form of novels (that is, each with an introductory sort of beginning, rising action that leads to a climax, followed by resolution), O’Brian was free to carry arcs through two and three and sometimes four books, so the reader never knows what to expect.

The second thing that made them work so well for me was their good nature. Though there are sharp, dark moments, and O’Brian’s heroes are complex, they are also humane. Aubrey’s vessels are basically happy ships— the community shaped by the wooden frame contains people who, when given the opportunity, will choose to do the moral thing. This I did not find, for example, in the Hornblower series, which I read as a teen until I got tired of the general atmosphere of weariness, and too few women characters.

Third: the period detail. Tolkien discusses in his essay “On Fairy Stories” how crucial inner consistency is for the creation of a secondary universe. O’Brian knows the early 19th Century. He has not taken his information from a single source or small set of secondary sources, often (in so many historical novels) so recognizable as to reduce the story to a blurred xerox. He knows the period so well that one can return to period works and experience that frisson of familiarity with concepts and phrases that might once have seemed alien—like in Smollett’s Roderick Random and Marryat’s clever but sometimes strange sea-going yarns, written while he was actually a post-captain in the 1820s and 1830s. By clever use of point-of-view, O’Brian first lets the reader imaginatively experience what a ship is like inside, from the crowded conditions to the smells and bells. Then he takes us into action—introducing us to a vastly different set of rules, etiquette, and paradigm largely unperceived by landsmen.

Glimpses of the maritime world—the ever-changing alien environment whose outmost boundaries are the coasts that enclose our familiar homelands—show up in various sources, from Byron to Jane Austen, but to land-oriented folk the sailor’s world is as strange as undersea life. It has its own customs, its own clothing, food, language, schedule—and its own awarenesses, which includes preoccupation with sea, sky, and tide that totally escapes those who never set foot off land. Weather is not an inconvenience, it’s either a medium or a deadly menace, and that’s a 24/7 constant. The ship is a tightly woven community whose bonds extend in a network not just through allies, but sometimes through enemies. Check out the friendly way the captains of the Shannon and the Chesapeake deliberately set up a ship battle off the coast of America—with deadly results, depicyed in The Fortune of War—an incident grounded in truth. And afterward, the remarkably unresentful way that the winners took care of the surviving losers, after dispassionately blowing away their captain and a shocking number of their crew. The etiquette involving who takes who as prizes, and how to treat prisoners, is as interesting as it is singular.

Fourth is the appreciation O’Brian conveys for music, mathematics, and science. Though the medical knowledge of the time was rudimentary at best, O’Brian charts a skillful course past grim and horrifying detail, managing to show the curiosity that natural philosophers had at the time—a curiosity that usually transcended political boundaries as German, French, and English natural philosophers cross back and forth despite the war to one another’s homelands, discoursing on discoveries in their mutually-shared Latin, the language of scholarship.

We Have the Weather-Gage of Them!

I am drawn back to the first volume, which I have at hand, in order to track the course of my first reading. Exactly where did I first get hooked, and why?

On the first page, we get a description of Jack and Stephen, who chance to be sitting side by side during a concert at Government House at Port Mahon. We stay in Jack’s POV as the first musical piece winds to an end. At the bottom of the page he turns to his seat-mate in a friendly way, pleasantly ready to see his enjoyment shared, and comments on the performance—to meet Stephen’s cold, angry whisper, “If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, not half a beat ahead.”

We are as surprised as Jack by this unexpected venom. Stephen’s whisper hovers in that peculiar space between humor and danger. Humor at the image of Jack vigorously beating time in the air without realizing it—wrong time, too—and danger because this is the age of duels. It causes a deeper resonance, a reminder that many took music seriously in those days, when entertainment was largely something people had to do for themselves.

Jack tucks his hand under his knee—another glimmer of humor in this recognizable human reaction—and they listen to the second piece, but it’s no good; at the end of the second he has not only been conducting again, but muttering pom pom pomunder his breath. Stephen drives his elbow into Jack’s side, who contemplates whether this thrust is, in fact, a blow? For of course a gentleman cannot countenance a blow. But this makes his remember his dreary situation—a penniless, debt-ridden lieutenant stuck on land with few hopes of a posting.

Meanwhile Mrs. Harte, the Admiral’s wife, has begun a technically difficult piece upon the harp, but she does not stay a neutral figure, decorating the background. Quite suddenly O’Brian slides into her POV as she watches Jack’s reaction to her playing. We feel her disappointment at his distracted reaction, which he so valiantly is trying to hide.

Bingo. Three characters, hardly a word of dialogue yet, but already the tangle of emotions, the prospects of danger, the unpredictability of what will come next, sends me racing on to find out what Stephen and Jack will do—and what’s going on with Mrs. Harte?

Jack returns to his inn. We meet Mercedes, who obviously likes him, so we know Jack is attractive to women. But O’Brian manages to convey it without mawkish sentiment or dreary superlatives about her looks—or his. Jack opens the letter she gives him to find instead of the expected dunning notice that this is orders. He’s about to take command of a ship! He is overjoyed, so happy he wants to spread joy around him; on an encounter with Stephen he apologizes so handsomely that Stephen responds with a complexity of emotions not quite discernible, but promising enlightenment later. How do we know? The only hint is the change of color in his face.

Stephen invites Jack for coffee, the waiter looks on Stephen with disapproval, which lets us know that Jack is not the only penniless one. They begin to talk, then Stephen’s attention is whipsawed—along with the reader’s—by a passing bird. He names it—Jack is confused—Jack asks, “Where? How does it bear?” which is the sailor’s response, after Stephen’s naturalist’s answers. Neither of them understand the other, but their natures require them to try. Meanwhile I, as reader, am delighted by their cross-purpose talk.

Just a few pages in, but already the characters are taking on complexity. Jack is so likable that I must see him on board his first command—and by that time, I have lost track of my own world, and time, and have been transported back to that hot spring day in 1800.

Shall We Have a Little Music?

Music runs as a subtheme through all the novels, binding together the two main characters.

Jack is tall, handsome, strong, smart, ignorant of anything much outside of the sea, cheerfully bigoted, and naturally good-natured—except when he’s up against the enemy. Stephen is ferociously intelligent, distrustful, passionate about freedom as only someone can be who has been brought up under an atmosphere of enforced political dependence. Jack is open, Stephen secretive.

The men are complex, they age and change; Stephen never does really master the sea world, though at times he thinks he’s got it, and many comical(and painful) moments ensue therefrom. Jack is bull-headed about political issues on land, and he has a roving eye, which gets him occasionally into trouble. Stephen is lethally subtle in the shadowy world of spies, an acute observer of human nature, and amazingly tolerant, except of bullying intolerance.The fact that Jack is a consummate musician when he is alone, and can only express his emotions through his violin.

I began to look forward to the recurring bits: Jack’s puns, his turning of contemporary aphorism into truly funny Spoonerisms, Stephen’s ignorance of the details of ship trim. Jack’s reverting to Stephen’s “Curtail” pun, the unresolved strain between the two on the matter of scientific exploration (Stephen wanting to explore, yet so often getting only a tempting glimpse of new territory—and Jack’s kindly patronization of Stephen’s incomphrehensible beetle-hunting) keep a steady thread of humor running through the novels. How many of us have just such nexi of contention with our nearest and dearest?

But O’Brian never permits the men to dwindle into Laurel and Hardy. Jack’s reflection on aging and the seemingly inevitable loss of ability—while never seeing his own steady increase in wisdom; Stephen’s sometimes profound alienation from the warp and weft of human intercourse, underscored by hints of his past—all contribute to insightful passages threaded with occasionally harrowing adventure. Love, children, attitude toward life and death, the changing world, human contradiction (characterized most frequently and entertainingly in the conservative, superstitious sailors who don’t like change—yet are constantly inventing little ways to enable their ships and guns to perform even better), gender and social status, differing forms of beauty, and how it is perceived, are some of the many layers to this story.

This Isn’t The Least Fling At You

Criticisms?

O’Brian breaks many of the ‘rules’ of writing. He uses omnisicient voice, bouncing from head to head, with only the most rare slip into the voice of an external narrator. But he does this with a skill that echoes the subtle narrative presence of Jane Austen’s best work. It was no surprise to discover that O’Brian considered Austen an influence.

Another rule he breaks, to the betterment of the novels, is the one about repetition. He is unafraid to have the same story or joke retold by various characters—or to repeat the entirety of a report or observation. Most of the time the retellings contain clues to the character of the speaker, clues that would escape the reader who hadn’t already known the facts. For example, Jack’s various repetitions of Stephen’s ‘curtail’ pun, and how his auditors react—and how he reflects on it. These repetitions subtly underscore change, and character, providing unexpected moments of insight.

Less defensible caveats: Frequently—most frequently at the novels’ ends—O’Brian resorts to sudden summations rather than showing us the scene, in order to bring a book (an episode) to a close. Small patterns emerge; for example, if a very beautiful young midshipman is introduced, you can be pretty sure he’s going to suffer a sudden death. And there are some small continuity glitches.

Considering the books separately, I believe the last three, The Yellow Admiral, The Hundred Days, and Blue at the Mizzen, are the weakest. I think the Geoghegan episode in book 18 is the least successful small story-thread of all; the idea had been done before, and more successfully, in previous books. The character seems dropped in, rather than woven, unlike others who meet the same fate, and the ending of the sequence is predictable from the moment the narrator focuses extensively on him. Adding to the sense of a grafted incident, it has almost no repercussions other than a couple of mentions.

Book 19 smacks the reader with two very sudden shocks, neither of which are resolved in the fine way that O’Brian handles similar occurrence in previous books. Diana’s death is kept entirely off-stage—so much that at first I thought it was not true, and we were getting an example of how, in these days of non-instantaneous communication, news could be distorted.

This novel is perhaps the most picaresque of all; there are incidents that seem to be there only to explain the workings of a ship, one after another, told in neutral or even mildly comic emotional tone, while the reader who is carried along by the profoundly strong emotional investment of 18 previous novels is waiting for the emotional backlash of Diana’s death. Then there is the introduction of Stephen’s new love, who seems designed to be perfect for him. A little too designed, too perfect. She is so accomodating she is bloodless, a robotic lady scientist, and I find myself wanting Diana to waltz in, throw her hat on the table, and say, “Dammit, Maturin, you cannot expect to be quit of me merely because I am dead!”

Bonden’s death is another shock, with little after-effect other than one intense moment. Bonden frankly deserved better; if he had to die, there should have been emotional consequences, as shown so beautifully in earlier books. Meanwhile, the name Geoghegan is used again; is this an oversight, perhaps, as Williamson’s forearm (blown off while fighting pirates, then never referred to again through two books) seems to be, or is this a relation of the boy? (A word of explanation—a remembrance of the name—might have taken care of that question.) In rereading, I’ve found that I want to stop on the last page of the 18th, which seems to function as a beautiful resolution to the entire roman fleuve.

Hull Down on the Horizon

Are these books for every reader? The whirls and eddies of side reflections—how the young were trained, what happens to sexual and emotional development during long enforced separations, how language evolved and who understood what from given words—seem to belong to the reader who likes, if not Proustian pacing, a much more flexible structure. For me, O’Brian’s mastery is displayed in his ability to braid the various story-threads into a whole bounded superficially by Napoleon’s reign. No one’s life is neatly resolved; the problems, and how they are addressed, alter as the characters age.

The pacing in O’Brian follows the ebb and flow of the sea. Some chapters race, others are contemplative. O’Brian frequently takes side-jaunts. Many are Stephen’s scientific expeditions, most of which give time to focus on character development as well. But my favorites are the humorous incidents, so like Jane Austen, that crop up even in the most tension-fraught sequences, such as Jack’s retelling of his acting Ophelia in a shipboard production of Hamlet, in the middle of a ship chase. This is not even remotely the Hamlet that Elizabethan audiences saw. In another book, three characters discourse on the theory of novel writing while traversing dangerous territory in the Australian outback.

O’Brian does not coddle the reader. Stephen’s private wish, on his first tour of the Sophie, to see Castlereagh dangling from one crosstree and Fitzgibbon from the other assumes that the reader is going to be aware of Castlereagh’s position in the government—and of Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s role in the ill-fated Irish Rebellion.

Knowing about Lord Edward Fitzgerald gives one added insight into Stephen, because his name comes up many times through the novels, providing a key to Stephen’s hidden nature. It’s stated that the two were related, and it is obliquely implied that Stephen was studying medicine in Paris when Lord Edward stayed with Thomas Paine during the early years of the French Revolution. Being related they have to have known one another, for Lord Edward had cleaved wholeheartedly to Charles James’ Fox’s admiration for the glorious precepts of the Revolution; in an orgy of high-minded oath-taking (that was the fashion during those days in Paris, for everyone was hyperaware of the fact that they were making history along with a new government and culture. Why, even women were making speeches, like the butcher’s daughter Olympe de Gouges) Lord Edward and his high-born friends renounced their titles on the Champs du Mars in ’90. Surely teenage Stephen was there, weeping, with the other very young men, at the birth of the Rights of Man!

Stephen would also have been by when Lord Edward married le duc d’Orleans’ bastard daughter. One who knows something of the Fitzgeralds’ remarkable family—related, by cruel fate, to a goodly part of the English Government, which makes Lord Edward’s betrayal and dismal death the more painful—and their c’est la vie attitude toward bastardy would understand something of Stephen’s upbringing. These ardent spirits, so fired by inspiration before the Revolution turned bloody-minded in earnest, sailed back to Ireland and met, in ’97-8, pretty much the same fate that so many visionaries—including Olympe de Gouges—suffered in Paris during the Terror Years.

Fitzgerald, King George, Talleyrand, Castlereagh…the great are kept firmly on the periphery of the action. Sir Walter Scott was the first historical novelist who kept his focus on the ordinary citizen, the one whose life is stirred by the eddying actions of the great, rather than inking out yet another imagined scene with the well-known figures of history, stuffing unlikely and orotumd speeches into their mouths, as poor Catherine complains to Mr. Tilney in Northanger Abbey. O’Brian does permit a brief glimpse of Talleyrand once, but slyly does not name him until pages later; the other prominent figures of the day are just around the corner, leaving our characters to react to (and cope with) the consequences of their actions.

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Masques

Sherwood Smith — Sun, 1 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Over the past two months a brainmovie unspooled through my fingers. It concerns the second generation, and the core idea was in mind a couple decades ago, but in those days you couldn't have relationships like these. Meanwhile I was looking at the consequences of having lived through a war. Though peace was declared more then ten years ago, the shadow of war is still there. Something I only realized in recent years I grew up with, having been a kid in the postwar years after WW II.

But I tried to keep it light, comedy-of-manners, no grit and drear. There's enough of that in the news. I like my happy endings.

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Soon to come...

Sherwood Smith — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

MASQUES

“Dance your passion in masque; ‘ware those who hear no music!”

It’s nearly fourteen years since the Norsunder War ended. But peacetime still has surprises for The Trouble With Kings’ second gen, especially those with high ambitions.

It all starts with a coming-of-age ball, and an abduction. On horseback. But when courtship wears the guise of high politics, the dance soon gets wild.

This romantic fantasy sequel stands alone.

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