Introducing A Dream Defiant!

I'll be taking a few months off from my series on titles and forms of address for the British aristocracy to celebrate my July 29 novella release, A Dream Defiant. Isn't the cover beautiful?

While this book is set in 1813 in the aftermath of the Battle of Vittoria, a cursory glance at the cover will tell you this isn't your typical Regency romance. Like most of my heroes, Elijah Cameron is a British soldier, one who's been in the army since his early youth and knows its ways well. But rather than leaving a village in England or Scotland as a lad, he grew up with his regiment. His parents, born in Virginia as slaves, ran away to the British lines during the American Revolution and spent the next twenty-five years as servants--free and fairly paid--of a senior officer in the regiment.

Growing up as he did, it's hardly surprising that Elijah became first a drummer boy and then a soldier. When his story opens he's content with his life, only to have it turned upside down when a dying comrade in arms entrusts him with a treasure to give to his soon-to-be-widow--a beautiful and quietly brave women Elijah has admired from afar for years.

So, what compelled me to write the story of a black redcoat in the Napoleonic Wars? Well, it started a few years ago, when I was reading about black Union soldiers in the Civil War on Ta-Nehisi Coates's blog. (See one such post HERE.)

I briefly considered writing my own Civil War story--it's an era I know almost as well as the Napoleonic Wars, after all. But I just couldn't get over the feeling that it was presumptuous of me to write a black Union soldier as a hero, given that I'm not only a white woman, I'm a white woman born and raised in Alabama and the great-great-granddaughter of a Confederate soldier from that same state. Put simply, I felt like I had no right to cloak myself in the mantle of the right side of a war where my ancestors were unequivocally on the wrong side.

(It's not that I feel guilty about my ancestry--I hardly chose it myself, after all--nor do I think my great-great-grandfather was a bad person. I don't know much about him, really, beyond that he was extremely fertile, fathering seventeen children with three wives in succession. He didn't own slaves--my family were poor Appalachian farmers right up through the Depression. He wasn't a moral giant enough to have challenged the values of his state and his culture, but how many of us are? Still, none of that changes the fact that the Civil War was one of those few conflicts with a clear right and wrong side, and my ancestor fought for the latter.)

So I decided to write about a black soldier in my era. I knew such soldiers existed, in both the French and British armies. They're mentioned in Swords Around a Throne, John Elting's encyclopedic book on Napoleon's army, and I'd run across occasional references in my research on the British army. While a black man in the British army was more likely to be in a West Indian regiment or to be part of a regimental band (that stereotype already existed, evidently), I never found any evidence that someone like my Elijah wouldn't have been permitted to enlist in a regular redcoat infantry regiment, so I gave my muse free rein. As for how well it turned out, in a little less than two months you can be the judge of that!

A Dream Defiant is already available for preorder at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google, and the iTunes store, and will be available on the Carina site and other e-tailers as the release date draws closer.

Your Peninsular War veteran hero: common errors and how to avoid them

Every once in awhile, when I'm judging the historical category of an unpublished romance contest or even reading a published book, I'll encounter something like this in a story set in 1812 or so:

"Sebastian Grey has just come home to claim his title as Earl of Wolfcliff. I wonder what he's like now. He's been with the Duke of Wellington on the Peninsula since 1805."

This inevitably sets me to sputtering because there are two glaring errors that tell me the author didn't do the research, even to the most basic degree--i.e. checking Wikipedia.

Sir Arthur Wellesley in 1804

First of all, there was no such person as the Duke of Wellington in 1805--nor, indeed, in 1812, though by that point I'll admit I'm splitting hairs with that statement. Of course the man known to history as the Duke of Wellington was around then, that just wasn't his name yet. Arthur Wellesley was born the third son of an earl, so he didn't inherit his titles--they were granted to him as a reward for his service and accomplishments. In 1805, he was still a young major-general whose talents were just beginning to become apparent, and he'd recently been made a Knight of the Bath. So if you met him in a ballroom, you'd call him Sir Arthur.

But you'd be unlikely to meet him a ballroom in 1805, and you certainly wouldn't find him on a battlefield in Portugal or Spain. He began the year in India, where he'd been serving since 1797, and spent months of it on a ship returning to England.

In fact, you wouldn't find ANY British troops fighting the French on the Iberian Peninsula at that point. You see, in 1805, Spain and France were allies. The force Horatio Nelson and the British navy defeated at Trafalgar was a combined French and Spanish fleet. That alliance didn't break until 1808, when Napoleon, not content with simply marching through Spain on the way to Portugal (which he'd successfully invaded in 1807), began pushing more troops into Spain and meddling with Spanish court politics--which, admittedly, were such a mess before he stepped in that he seems to have honestly expected to have been greeted as a liberator when he put his brother Joseph on the throne.

Joseph Bonaparte in 1808

Instead, his actions triggered a popular uprising...and made the Spanish willing to work with their long-time enemies from Britain and Portugal to gain their liberation. All of which gives us the Peninsular War--which from a British perspective ran from August 1808 till April 1814.

As for Arthur Wellesley, you and your characters can begin calling him Wellington as of the latter part of 1809, when he was made Viscount Wellington after his victory at the Battle of Talavera. He then became Earl of Wellington in early 1812 and Marquess of Wellington a few months later, but he wasn't created Duke of Wellington until May 1814.

Because I've researched the Peninsular War and Wellington in some depth, I know everything in the quick summary above off the top of my head. But you know where I went to confirm I had my dates right? Wikipedia.

I'd never counsel using Wikipedia as your only source for any piece of history that plays more than a superficial role in your writing, but it's a good place to start. Really, if you have an internet connection--and you must, if you're reading this blog--there's not much of an excuse for botching names and dates as in my Sebastian Grey example above. And while I made up that quote, I've seen those two errors again and again.

The thing about the Napoleonic Wars, and the French Revolutionary Wars that preceded them, is that they're plural, and with a few brief interruptions lasted a quarter of a century. Alliances shifted, dissolved, and re-formed, and the theater of war encompassed pretty much all of Europe and a good chunk of the rest of the world. (Just to name two well-known examples, Napoleon invaded Egypt, partly because he hoped it would be a gateway to breaking the British hold on India. And in a world with no Napoleon, the War of 1812 wouldn't have happened.) 

So if you want to have a hero with a military or naval background in a Regency, the possibilities are all but infinite--but keep in mind that what works for 1810 wouldn't make sense in 1805 or 1800, and do a little homework. Trust me, it's fun, and if you want to go deeper than Wikipedia, I'd be happy to point you toward some good sources.

Susanna Fraser's next Carina release, An Infamous Marriage, is now available for preorder from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.co.uk.

Help me name my next heroine!

I turned in the manuscript for my next Carina book, An Infamous Marriage, less than a week ago, so I’m taking the first half of April off from writing. But that doesn’t mean a break from thinking about my next (as yet uncontracted) project.

I’m still in the earliest research and brainstorming stage, but I’m planning to write a novella, working title Widow’s Choice, set in the same milieu as my debut book, The Sergeant’s Lady--i.e. with Wellington’s army on the Iberian Peninsula. Only this time neither the hero nor the heroine is an aristocrat.

The hero already has a name--Elijah Cameron--and as soon as I thought of it I knew I couldn’t possibly call him anything else. The heroine remains nameless...but you can help me change that!

I’m still working out the details of her backstory, but I know she’s an English country girl, possibly a farmer’s daughter or a former dairymaid. She’s very pretty in what I think of as a classically English way--chestnut hair, blue or gray eyes, and rosy cheeks. She’s the kind of woman you’d expect to meet walking down a lane like this, if you happened to be walking down it 200 years ago:



So I want her name to capture that essential Englishness, and in a way that sounds distinctive without sounding upper-class. Here are my ideas for her first and last name. The last name list is much longer because, as I sometimes complain to my critique partners, The Big Book of Historically Accurate Regency Baby Names is more like a pamphlet. Let me know which combination you think would best fit my character, or feel free to suggest alternatives. Right now I’m waffling between Jenny Steptoe and Rose Longshaw, but I’m willing to be persuaded.

First Names:

Sarah
Jenny
Rose

Last Names:

Barnshaw
Fairbrother
Hawcott
Holyoak
Hopcraft
Lamborn
Longshaw
Lovegrove
Maycock
Mellidew
Merrifield
Narroway
Snowhouse
Steptoe
Wellstood
Dowsing
Oxborrow

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Susanna Fraser writes Regency romance with a focus on the Napoleonic Wars. The Sergeant's Lady and A Marriage of Inconvenience are available now from Carina Press.