The Old School Historical Where the Hero Makes the Heroine Go on a Diet

[CW: threatened sexual assault/kidnapping/dieting/body shaming]

The star of my first #historicalhistorical post comes to me courtesy of my grandmother’s house. She has always lived by the ocean, so her shelves are filled with 40 years of abandoned beach reads. Most of the romances are Westerns from the 80s, but I found this one lone regency, The Rake’s Protégé (1985) by Barbara Hazard, on her shelves last summer.

The thing that really blew me away about this book were the scenes where THE HERO FORCES THE HEROINE TO GO ON A DIET. I don’t know if this was a trope in 70s and 80s historicals (maybe someone who knows the old school historical better than me can answer that question??) but I had never seen it before and it. was. wild. For me personally, there is nothing less appealing than a hero who wants his love interest to slim down...and thinks its NBD for her/him/them to be hungry!!

In The Rake’s Protégé, the context around these dieting scenes only brings up more questions for me than answers. If we take the Regency romance as a tool to expose the injustices of nineteenth-century hierarchies that still undergird society today, then the book has a classic wager set-up that does this work well. Anthony Hawkins, Earl of Bredon, makes a bet with his friends that he can turn a servant girl into a high-society lady. Anthony and his friends choose the eleven-year-old Anne Ainsworth, a random orphan kicking around the Bredon manor, as the candidate for this experiment. She is whisked off to live in the country with a respectable vicar to train for her debut. Of course, when it comes time for the bet to be settled, Anthony sees Anne—now nearly eighteen years old—and instantly becomes smitten, resolving that once the bet is over he will make her his mistress. However, many things conspire to keep this pair apart, including Anne’s understandable resistance to becoming Anthony’s mistress after her adolescence spent in a vicarage. She eventually rebels against Anthony, who she deified as a child for rescuing her from orphanhood, but now comes to despise him when they reunite and she realizes that he is an unrepentant asshole (see aforementioned dieting scenes!!). Once Anne escapes his clutches, Anthony chases after her as she tries to discover the story of her real parentage. In the final climax, Anne is captured by one of Anthony's rivals in the original wager. He wants to get rid of Anne so that she cannot make her debut—the financial consequences of losing the bet will ruin him—and, on top of that, he plans to sexually assault her. Bredon saves her from his rapist ex-friend and they finally have their HEA.

For this reader, however, all of these events—which I found largely well-plotted and engaging—pale in comparison to the truly bonkers dieting scenes!!!! This focus on dieting begins early in their reunion. When Anthony meets Anne again, he finds her extremely beautiful but with one flaw:

“He noted she was shapely, although his connoisseur’s eye deplored her slightly overabundant charms. A sharp reduction in her food intake would take care of that, he told himself, and if that was the only fault she had, he could count himself fortunate indeed” (48).

Once he takes her back to his manor, he introduces the diet, although not before setting her in front of an elaborate dinner with a million different dishes. Like any sensible human, Anne resolves that “she must try a little of everything.” Unfortunately, the Earl chooses this moment to introduce his diet plan, “his cool gray eyes…surveying her plate”:

“I see you have a hearty appetite, Anne,” he remarked.

Anne saw that he had taken only a slice of the salmon and a small spoonful of peas, and that he had ignored the white sauce with dill which she had spooned so generously over her fish. She had also agreed to a slice of oyster pie, some duchesse potatoes, and the carrots glazed with honey.

For a moment she felt embarrassed, but then she smiled. “It all looks so good, m’lord. I wanted to sample everything. It is true I have a good appetite, and I do enjoy my food.” [Editor’s Note: ME TOO GIRL!!!]

The earl’s eyes raked her shoulders and breasts. “Obviously,” he murmured, signaling Midler to refill his wineglass.

Anne felt a flush begin in the pit of her stomach and spread upward, and she put down her fork….

“You must forgive me for pointing it out, Anne, but you are much too heavy. Our society ladies all strive for a willowy look, for that is the vogue now. I do not think in your present state that you could be considered willowy by any stretch of the imagination.

Anne felt her throat grow tight with incipient tears, and she lowered her eyes in confusion.

“Poor poppet,” the earl continued, his deep voice warmer now. “Do not look so distressed! But before we go up to town, you must learn how to curb your appetite. I shall delay sending for the dressmakers until you have lost the weight that is necessary. You see, my dear Anne, I want you at your best when you meet the ton. It will make you look like a princess at the least, to say nothing of being…mm, more appealing, shall we say?”

Poor Anne! I felt so bad for this girl when I read this scene. She just wants to enjoy her dill sauce! Let her have it, you monster! I can forgive a lot in a hero, but shaming a girl for enjoying a sumptuous dinner is definitely NOT one of these things. This behavior is truly unforgivable and not even the best grovel in the world could ever bring it back for me--say what you want about Christian Grey and his controlling nature, but he is always encouraging Ana to eat. Instead, Anthony is the worst incarnation of the Stern Brunch Daddy that I can imagine.

Eventually, after Anne commits to the “reducing diet,” Anthony realizes that she is getting TOO THIN and he demands that she stop and I guess then she does? But it seems like this weight loss is maintained across the story.

Which leaves me wondering about the meaning of this dieting trope. The dieting element is very intentional and even highlighted in the title page summary: “He put her on a near-starvation diet to give her the slenderness that fashion decreed.” And, yet, I’m not sure what the reader is supposed to take away from this part of the text.

Is the diet and subsequent weight loss supposed to be part of the overall aspirational trajectory for Anne as a romance heroine? She not only finds love, but reaches her “ideal” weight? This reading would make the book pro-dieting, which not only would be a real bummer but also doesn’t feel completely authentic to the book itself. Hazard definitely wants us to sympathize with Anne in the above scene, for instance.

Maybe that reading doesn’t acknowledge enough the work that romance novels are often doing to respond to and dismantle misogynistic aspects of culture. By putting this dieting trope in her romance, is Hazard representing yet another aspect of toxic masculinity that Anne triumphs over in taming Anthony?

I’m curious to hear what others think about this trope/if there are any examples of this trope in old school historicals that people know of. Comments welcome below!

Why Jane Austen Would LOVE Contemporary Regency Romance

It is my personal belief that Jane Austen would have LOVED contemporary Regency romance, the steamier the better. If there is an afterlife, Jane Austen is there right now reading Lisa Kleypas and drinking Madeira. No one can tell me different.

I say this because I often encounter statements that work to distance Austen from contemporary Regencies and the modern romance genre in general. A good example is this recent Vox article: https://www.vox.com/culture/22970932/georgette-heyer-novels-movies-adaptations-folio-venetia. The majority of this article agitates for adapting Georgette Heyer for the screen (and I agree with those on social media who have called this idea terrible due to Heyer's bigotry, anti-Semitism, imperialist worldview, etc.), so it is flawed in more ways than one, but it also serves as an example of how writers and critics often separate Austen from the contemporary romance genre and historical romance particularly. In short, the article suggests that Austen’s novels aren’t “romances” in the sense that we understand them now. In this take and those like it, Austen is acknowledged as an influence on contemporary historical romance—only to then be quickly opposed to and excepted from the genre.

This argument drives me BONKERS. For so many reasons. First, I hate when this move is used to imply that Austen’s work is literature and contemporary romance novels aren’t (in my experience, that is the most common purpose of this line of thought). Second, I hate what this argument suggests about Austen and her work. The claim that Austen's novels aren't really romance novels very much corroborates the narrative of her life released by her family in the Victorian period. Years after her death, Austen's nephew put out a biography of his aunt that deliberately depicted her as a respectable, talented spinster who had an unimpeachable reputation. Responding to continued interest in her work, the Austen family wanted to ward off any scandalous intimations that might be attached to a single woman known for writing love stories (and whose work included risqué jokes and characters who have sex outside of marriage). Those who separate Austen from the romance genre reach back to this portrayal and use it to authenticate Austen as a restrained, lofty artist—not a writer of love stories that draw on both mind and body to depict the intense connections experienced by their central characters.

I’m not going to go through every reason here why the suggestion that Austen's novels aren't romances is ridiculous or detail the clear historical reasons why Austen couldn’t have penned novels franker about sexuality. Instead, I wanted to turn to one of my favorite quotes from Pride and Prejudice to show the vibrancy of Austen's interest in sexual fantasy and erotic fulfillment. This quote does not concern Elizabeth or Darcy (!!), but another young lady poised to follow a certain militia to Brighton:

“In Lydia’s imagination, a visit to Brighton comprised every possibility of earthly happiness. She saw, with the creative eye of fancy, the streets of that gay bathing-place covered with officers. She saw herself the object of attention, to tens and to scores of them at present unknown. She saw all the glories of the camp—its tents stretched forth in beauteous uniformity of lines, crowded with the young and the gay, and dazzling with scarlet; and, to complete the view, she saw herself seated beneath a tent, tenderly flirting with at least six officers at once.”

Six officers at once!!! Fantasizing about attentions from "tens and scores" of men "at present unknown"!! How could anyone argue that Austen’s novels are not deeply about passion and sexual desire and rapacious, irrepressible appetites when you read a passage like this one? Sure—you can call this passage satirical free indirect discourse, but, even if Lydia is being mocked, her imagination is real and Austen is giving life to a woman's erotic fantasies on the page. I read this passage as setting the stage for contemporary Regency romance. Lydia's innumerable erotic fantasies turn into the amazing Regency romances written in the 20th and 21st century.

I picked my pen name because of this passage—and because I think the insatiable erotic appetite that Austen gives Lydia is one of her most important contributions to the contemporary romance genre. (Lydia’s untamable desires are also in many ways an expression of the same fascination with female sexual appetite that powered much of Austen’s juvenilia—which, for anyone who hasn’t read it, is much more explicitly scandalous than her six complete published novels).

There has also been some great scholarship on sexuality in Austen’s novels and how her novels abound in dirty jokes and double entendres. I’ve put a list below for anyone interested who hasn't had a chance to read these articles yet!

*

Alice Chandler’s “‘A Pair of Fine Eyes’: Jane Austen’s Treatment of Sex”

Deidre Shauna Lynch, “Jane Austen and the Sex Positive Novel”

Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, “Pleasure is now, and ought to be, your business’: Stealing Sexuality in Jane Austen’s Juvenilia”

https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/sexuality/heydt/heydt.html

Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, “‘Slipping into the Ha-Ha’: Bawdy Humor and Body Politics in Jane Austen’s Novels”

Favorite February Historicals

Every month I read as many new historical romances set in the nineteenth-century as I can and I will be reviewing my favorites here. I explain below why I loved my three favorites for this month!

Sophie Jordan’s The Rake Gets Ravished

In the first four chapters of this historical, Sophie Jordan gives a master class in how to open a book that will suck the reader in and not let them go. If you like books that start quickly, then The Rake Gets Ravished is for you. The set-up is legitimate genius and exactly the kind of wild conceit that I read romance to enjoy. The novel opens with Mercy Kittinger showing up at the Rogue’s Den, a gaming hell, determined to steal back her family farm. Her brother lost their estate gambling at the Rogue’s Den days before and Mercy has resolved to take back the voucher validating the transfer of property. She sneaks up to the rooms of Silas Masters, the owner of the Rogue’s Den, but he returns before she can leave with the voucher. Already dressed like a courtesan, she decides to pretend that she is in his rooms to seduce him. Given that she finds him extremely attractive, Mercy essentially sees it as a two-birds-one-stone situation. She gets to lose her virginity to a handsome man and keep her family farm. The two spend the night together and, let me tell you folks, it. is. hot.

This set up is masterfully executed and absolutely delicious. The first four chapters are from Mercy’s perspective, which is a little unconventional—it is rare in a historical to go that long without getting one of the main character’s perspectives, but here it totally works. By the time we get Silas’s POV, the reader is dying for a look into his thoughts. After their night together, Jordan drops us into Silas’s perspective and we watch him quickly realize that Mercy stole from him and that seduction was not her primary aim in his bedroom. Of course, because he is a romance hero, he pursues Mercy back to her farm in Shropshire in order to confront her. When he arrives, he tells Mercy that he is there to make sure that she isn’t with child (!!), because he would never allow his offspring to be uncared for. I really liked that Silas gives this reason as his motivation for following Mercy back to Shropshire. I appreciated that Silas didn’t demand that Mercy return the farm or really give her a hard time for even stealing the voucher in the first place. In making her potential pregnancy his motivation, Jordan struck the perfect balance between alpha and cinnamon role with Silas. He is a pushy alpha…but about wanting to take care of his future child.

Silas’s demeanor worked really well with Mercy and I was quickly sold on their romance once he turns up on the farm. Mercy has so much responsibility heaped on her in having to take care of her sister and the family farm—her parents died years ago and everything has since fallen to her. On top of all of that, her brother, who technically owns the farm and all of the family assets, is selfishness incarnate, as evidenced by his losing of the farm in the first place. It wouldn’t have worked to have Silas treat Mercy with anything but kindness and support and he provides that perfectly. For his part, Silas is clearly looking for a partner who will give his life a purpose outside of making money and you can see how Mercy centers him.

Also, as a side note, I was impressed by the scene where Mercy and her sister, Grace, get into a huge fight. Mercy has essentially raised her sister, but their age difference isn’t that big, so she is stuck between being a parent and a sibling to her. She has the responsibility of a parent but the authority of a sibling, which is a really tough place to be in, and Jordan renders her dilemma beautifully. In their fight, Grace tells Mercy that she hates her and, in this moment, Mercy feels that Grace is unrecognizable to her. This scene was extremely well-done and felt very realistic for this relationship and the difficulties of parenting a teenager.

Lastly, I appreciated that, even though Mercy was a virgin heroine, Jordan made her sexuality a bit more developed than that descriptor may suggest. Mercy has read a lot of erotica (left behind by her brother after he went to Eton) and she has very much explored her sexuality by herself, so it made her seduction of Silas much richer. It was a refreshing twist on the virgin heroine trope.

Overall, The Rake Gets Ravished was a stunning read. I really recommend it to anyone looking to be swept away by a historical.

Scarlett Scott’s Sutton’s Surrender

Scarlett Scott is the reigning queen of the Regency Romance Amazon bestseller list and, when you read her books, it is clear why. I have previously enjoyed books from her Notorious Ladies of London series. I found Lady Ruthless in particular very hot and would recommend that one to anyone who enjoys a super steamy historical read with characters whose sexual chemistry really jumps off the page. I would classify her books as erotic romance and, if you enjoy this subgenre as I do, then I really recommend her work. I hadn’t read any of the Sinful Suttons series, but, when I saw that Sutton’s Surrender had come out recently (I think technically it came out at the end of January, but for the purposes of this list, I am counting it as a February release), I really wanted to try it. I had no issues jumping in at the middle of the series and I will also say that I enjoy how in Scott’s series the timelines of the different books overlap. Instead of having all the plotlines be purely sequential, different hero/heroine connections are often happening concurrently and so the events of the other books are hinted at more thoroughly in any given entry than in your typical series. I am really here for the layered world-building that approach gives to her books.

And I loved Sutton’s Surrender! It has one of my favorite historical romance dynamics: the uptight, “proper” aristocrat who is undone by his love interest. I love a rake, too, but, honestly, I might love the proper aristocrat more. I just love seeing his resolve break as he realizes he can’t stay away from his love interest! It very much harkens back to the OG romance hero, Mr. Darcy, and how he struggles with the clash between his sexuality and his social role. I am trash for it and will read it every time. Garrick Weir, Lord Lindsey, had major Mr. Darcy vibes, particularly since he originally meets Penelope because he is trying to stop her supposed engagement to his brother. It made me think of that line from Pride and Prejudice during Darcy’s first proposal to Elizabeth where he says of Mr. Bingley: “Towards him I have been kinder than towards myself.” Similarly, Garrick is horrified that his brother would marry “a lowly East End girl” like Pen, but he quickly finds himself contemplating the prospect for himself. It is an old trope and I LOVE it.

I really liked the heroine here, too. I thought Penelope Sutton was rendered as a very relatable and complex heroine and that Scott conveyed her class position with nuance. Her class identity really leapt off the page—I enjoyed that she could act the part of the proper lady because she had had an education due to her family’s money but that she also frequently codeswitches back into the speech register of her East End milieu. It was great that Garrick was equal parts horrified and turned on by her knowledge of the other half of London and that really gave them a sexy dynamic. I also really enjoyed that her friendship with Garrick’s brother Aiden (the brother who drives Garrick into Pen’s life to begin with) was genuine. It can still be rare in historical romance—and just media in general—to have a real friendship between a man and a woman that truly isn’t romantic in nature and Scott really landed that here. By the end, despite the fake engagement and a brief fake out where it seemed like Aiden might actually have feelings for Pen, it became clear that these two had only ever been friends—and good ones at that. I really appreciated how their original characterization of their connection as a friendship holds true by the end.

I also give Scott a lot of credit for the nineteenth-century flavor of the language in her work—it always feels like she captures the cadences of the period in the way her characters speak and think. Oh, and, as mentioned above, Scott really knows how to write a sex/kissing scene. I really loved the early interaction between Pen and Garrick when they kiss and he tries to pretend that he didn’t enjoy it. She challenges him by saying, “Then how do you explain your cockstand?” He is so horrified by this comment---“how

incredibly common of her to give voice to the unspeakable"--and it is hilarious and hot all at once.

All in all, Sutton’s Surrender is a super fun and sexy read! And I really recommend this one if you enjoy historical romances that tip towards the more erotic side of the spectrum and have a soft spot for the cross-class trope.

Eva Leigh’s The Good Girl’s Guide to Rakes

I have read A LOT of Avon books, but, somehow, The Good Girl’s Guide to Rakes was my first Eva Leigh. I am glad that I picked this one up because I very much enjoyed Celeste and Kieran’s love story and the fun set up of this series!

The conceit for the series is definitely high concept. The parents of three best friends—two siblings, Kieran and Finn, and Dom—decide that they have finally crossed the line with their rakish ways and issue an ultimatum: all three of them must marry respectable ladies within the year or they will be disinherited. This opener felt very historically accurate to me! As someone who has read a lot of novels actually written by nineteenth-century British people, this decree from these men’s parents felt pitch-perfect for the period. (Although real nineteenth-century aristocratic parents would probably have explicitly stipulated that the ladies need to have dowries of a certain size, because these people were obsessed with money). In order to meet his parents’ demands, Kieran approaches Celeste and asks if she can reintroduce him into respectable society so that he can find a wife. She accepts but on the condition that he show her the disreputable side of London. It is a delectable set up that you know will deliver on its promise.

I really appreciated Kieran as a hero and how he broke the rake mold in certain key ways while still ultimately hewing to the trope. I listened to the Plot Trysts episode in which Laine and Meg reviewed this book and they pointed out that Kieran is a bit unusual in being an artistic-minded, bohemian rake. I too liked that he was a poet and that he had artistic ambitions for himself. Kieran seemed like the victim of a culture and family that did not want him to express his emotions or have feelings at all and that his rakish ways were more of a product of wanting to find an outlet for self-expression and connection rather than the dissolute product of a traumatic backstory. Essentially, Kieran is on the more light-hearted side of the rake scale, which I always find charming. As many reviews have mentioned, he wears eyeliner at one point---and it is not a big deal for him, it is just something that he puts on to give a little bit more flare to his going-out look---and I can see why so many people mention it because that pretty much sums up his vibe.

Celeste was also a really vivid character and I particularly appreciated the early chapters from her perspective. Leigh does such a great job showing how trapped Celeste feels in her respectable genteel life. I also loved the contrast between her origins in the working-class neighborhood of Ratcliff and her current existence. Leigh has a great metaphor for Celeste’s life circumstances in Chapter 3 when she discusses how she has to tamp down her hair with pins: “Her locks always were a little unruly, which was why Dolly had to use fistfuls of pins to keep everything straight and tidy, the hair of a perfectly respectable young lady. On their own, the pins didn’t weigh very much, but when employed en masse, they were impossibly heavy. Her scalp ached every night when Dolly slid them from her hair, and never fully recovered by the morning when it was time to put them back in place.” This description powerfully captures the stultifying and painful effects of her environment on Celeste. These moments convinced me that Celeste really did need to break out of her prescribed role. And it was really fun to watch her get that chance with Kieran.

I also want to highlight the scene where Kieran and Celeste are at a raucous evening soiree and a bunch of guests are reading out loud from an erotic book called The Lady of Dubious Quality. Celeste starts reciting a scene from memory and Kieran is like WHAT. It was a very cool set piece and I have never seen a moment quite like it before in a historical.

I recommend The Good Girl’s Guide to Rakes, particularly if you are in the mood for a light-hearted, low-angst historical. Or if have a weakness for rake/wallflower and crave a fresh twist on this classic trope!