Comments for Evangeline Holland

Comment on What Is The HEA? by Anna Bowling

Anna Bowling — Tue, 21 May 2013 17:31:31 +0000

For me, the HEA means that the hero and heroine have each other, are exclusively committed to each other, and they’ll take whatever comes at them as a team. There may be babies, there may not be babies. They may be wealthy or lose everything but each other.

Since I write and read historical, we know that these couples aren’t going to live in Utopia. There will be wars, diseases, diasters, etc, but neither hero nor heroine would be facing them alone.

I have read and liked stories where a hero or heroine must leave their beloved, but don’t count those as genre romance; Remains of the Day, for example. Still a great story, but not a genre romance.

Comment on On the Time-Consuming Quest of Research by Gen Turner

Gen Turner — Thu, 16 May 2013 16:26:44 +0000

Ah, the black hole of historical research…I’ve fallen into that one before. Just the other day I sent looking for something online–I can’t remember what–ended up finding a telephone directory from 1898 and spent an hour researching the history of the telephone before realizing there was no way I could shoehorn a telephone into my story.

Here’s the link if anyone else has an hour they want to waste:
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~npmelton/ctelindx.html

Comment on The Trouble with Historical Romance by Caz

Caz — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:51:16 +0000

I thought my students would love Lord of Scoundrels, and I have a colleague who thought Heyer’s The Grand Sophy would be the hit of the course. We were both wrong. Our students (ages 18 -22) want their romance novels told in simple and direct language, a la J. R. Ward.

This is a fascinating comment – and something that has occurred to me, too. My daughter definitely prefers historical fiction to fantasy – she’s got no patience with sparkly vampires! I gave her what I thought was one of Heyer’s funniest books – Friday’s Child – to read last year, and although she read it and quite liked it, she was less enthusiastic than I’d hoped, and I wonder if that’s due to the fact that she’s not yet attuned to the conventions of the time OR if it’s as that commenter said, and she found the language too complex and the pacing too slow. (Even though she’s very articulate and reads a lot.)

And it then got me thinking. I read and review a lot of books, and something I am continually coming across what I regard as simplistic language and motivations in some of the work by newer authors I read. Of course, it’s not all newer authors, I don’t mean that much of a generalisation, but I am definitely seeing a lack of complex characterisations, structures, motivations. At first I just thought I was unlucky with the books I had chosen and that it was bad writing. But I’ve begun to think more recently that perhaps this “dumbing down” is more to do with a desire for simplicity and an unwillingness on the part of some readers to do any of the work for themselves.

Comment on The Trouble with Historical Romance by Evangeline Holland

Evangeline Holland — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:11:34 +0000

Ouch. Not interested in Mixed-Up Files! That’s sacrilege!

I think the rise of social media (dreaded text speak) has led to a desire for more simpler language combined with spectacular effects. Not so much “dumbing down”–or that the younger generation does not appreciate lovely prose–but a shift in how they consume the written word. And how important they consider the written word when it’s so ephemeral–a tweet, a text, a Facebook status, an Instagram description.

It’s interesting that your daughters prefer fantasy over historicals. I’d read a few of the top selling YA historicals (like the Luxe series) a few years ago, and winced over the simplistic presentation of history and the wallpaper characterization that served up drama over substance. So the love of YA fantasy, which paints a colorful world packed with adventure and action, is funny!

Comment on The Trouble with Historical Romance by pamela1740

pamela1740 — Thu, 16 May 2013 12:39:28 +0000

I keep coming back to this/these discussions….! This week I’ve been thinking a lot about how I came to historical romance/fiction even as a middle grade reader, via Patricia Beatty, Lois Lenski, Witch of Blackbird Pond, etc. Then it sounds like I discovered the same rich vein of books that you did — Victoria Holt, Barbara Cartland, Anya Seton, Mary Renault, etc. I read both Jane Eyre and GWTW the same summer, and that pretty much sealed the deal in terms of wanting my nose in historical fiction and/or romance all the time.
Fast forward to 2013, and I am now mom to two very bookish middle grade girls who REFUSE to read historical fiction, and insist that only “books with some magic and fantasy elements, mom” are satisfying and “interesting enough.” I try to tempt them with some of the amazing newer MG and YA historical fiction that has exploded in the intervening decades, but the explosion of MG and YA fantasy has been even more epic, and casts a much more powerful spell on them.
The other factor is, as you noted, the language and style of the writing itself. They are accustomed to more dialogue, less description, and faster pacing, and I wonder if they find it harder to connect with older books that they perceive as having a more formal or stilted tone. They wouldn’t express it this way, but they frequently abandon books like A Wrinkle In Time in favor of something like The Mysterious Benedict Society, and for some reason they vastly prefer the new Sixty Eight Rooms (a clever fantasy novel about the Chicago Art Institute miniature period rooms) over the classic Mixed Up Files. Party this is the headiness of magical realism but I think it’s also about the language.

Over on my recent post about favorite Regencies (speaking up for historical romance, etc.), a friend who teaches a college-level history of romance fiction commented

“But reading your post makes me wonder if the heightened language of Regencies, a trait that I adore but my students patently did not, works against the genre now.

I thought this was pretty fascinating.

http://badassromance.com/2013/05/14/never-say-die-speaking-up-for-badass-regencies/#comments