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| Cerise at Ham House, outside London |
The biggest challenge to writing historical romances is
getting all the facts right! The romance usually comes to you in a flash. The
hero appears, the heroine startles or the conflict between them lives for you.
But getting the details about their relationship correct and the setting is a
huge challenge. Research, not just those facts found in the pages of a thick
nonfiction tome, but those discovered on holiday abroad make my job as a writer
a delight!
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| My latest book based on research trips to Paris and Montmartre! |
Traveling to “imbibe” the setting and atmosphere of the
period is a great way to spend a vacation. I think so. I know many authors
do. Some go alone. Others take
their friends or spouses. Mine, thank goodness, is tickled to go. And because
he speaks French (and I speak German), we complement each other and get so much
done!
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| Pump Room, Bath, England |
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| Door from library to Duke's bedroom Ham House |
Luckily, he likes my choices of places to visit and things
to do. All of them, we research on-line and in printed references at home
months before we catch the plane. This May is our next vacation when we do the
Loire Valley for 3 weeks (and 12 castles, a vineyard and a monastery!) and then
back to Paris to eat well, walk and visit old haunts.
What can you learn by doing this kind of research on the
hoof?
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| Briska de Voyage at Vaux le Vicomte, south of Paris made by Fuller in Bath, England |
For one thing, you learn how far a house was from the center
of royal court! In this first photo, I stand before Ham House in what is now
suburban London. But in the early 17th century, this grand estate was far
enough from the capital to be serene and close enough to allow the owners (earls
of Dysart and Lauderdale) to respond to any summons from the monarch.
What you also learn from such a trip is a sense of terrain
and social intercourse. Ham House is on the river. Very close to two other
notable country homes, Ham sits so close, you can look across the river and
imagine how members of the families visited—or argued—or fell in love with
those nearby. You can also stroll through the kitchens (like the one where I’m
standing in Kenwood House) and marvel at the huge roasting pit. You can examine
the kitchen garden where the lady of the house painstakingly grew her
vegetables. You can enjoy the stillroom where cooks dried herbs or the dairy
room where maids separated cream and churned butter. You can admire the dolls
that were Queen Victoria’s when she was a child. Or note the splendor of her
bedroom when she visited Syon House. Even more intriguing is to stand next to
the figure of Prince Albert her husband in all his court regalia (as he is in
Kensington Palace) and note that he was rather short!
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| Queen Victoria's doll collection, Kensington Palace, London |
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| Regency Town House, Brunswick Square, Brighton |
You get to admire the true colors of a Regency library as at
Kenwood House. Or the splendor of the dining rooms in their formal table
service as in those at Syon House (owned by the dukes of Northumberland) and in
the Imperial Palais de Compiegne (Bourbon kings and Bonaparte emperors) in
suburban Paris. You go to Bath, as Jane Austen did, and have high tea in the
Pump Room, drinking ‘the waters’. Tasting it, you discover it’s rather metallic
and very unpleasantly warm! You go to Montmartre up on the windy hill in Paris
and note that the Moulin Rouge beckons. So does the Moulin de la Galette where
Parisians went to dance each night to escape their small rooms. Today, a
restaurant stands there, but you can imagine yourself waltzing…and you can
dream that your characters do too.
Farther up the Butte in Montmartre, you can enter the house
that Auguste Renior once rented. Now a museum, the house displays the atelier of many an artist who gladly
lived up in the suburb of Paris. Here the breezes cooled them and wealthier
citizens came to buy their paintings and their sculptures.
Walking along the streets of Paris, you can imagine what
hardship it must have been to walk the cobbles for miles in wooden shoes. Or
how comforting to climb into a smart Briska Voyage carriage (made in Bath,
England and now on display at Vaux-le-Vicomte, south of Paris). You imagine
sitting in the library at Spencer House looking out on Green Park, so close that
people would walk up and wave at the earls inside!
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| Atelier of artist, Musee de Montmartre, Paris |
You can see the effects of candles and smoke on the bright
Regency colors of the walls, turning them dingy. You can smell the old, fine
leather of the chairs and marvel at the original volumes of Ivanhoe
and Pride and Prejudice on the library shelves.
You can imagine your hero and heroine waltzing in the
ballroom at Syon House. Or see them strolling along South Moulton Street in
London to go to the dressmakers or the tailors. Or climb into the high tester
bed swathed in yards of stiff brocade as they retire for the night.
Painting with words without such rich sensations would be
creating from whole cloth, poor representations and bland.
Travel abroad adds color, enrichment and accuracy to our
novels. And aren’t you glad, authors take such time and care to show you what
life was like for those characters who ‘existences’ we choose to enrich by having
them fall in love?
Who is Cerise?
Cerise DeLand loves to cook, hates to
dust, lives to travel, read and write!
She pens #1 Bestselling Regencies and
spicy romances starring SEALs! Yep. She loves a dashing, hunky man paired with
a sassy woman.
Find Cerise:
Cerise DeLand's Amazon Author Page:
https://www.amazon.com/-/e/B0089DS2N2
Follow her on Twitter: @cerisedeland
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