Reading the Regency — Gretna Green in Novel Form

I’ve developed a new book addiction.

I’ve always liked old books.  Really old books.  I admit it.  I learned to read out of the Wizard of Oz, grew up on Alice in Wonderland and E. Nesbitt and company.  As an adult, I discovered Bronte, Austen, Gaskell, and, of course, Shakespere.  What I didn’t know until recently was how many contemporaries Jane Austen had when it came to writing lively, witty romances. The group name for the books were “Silver Fork novels,” as they frequently, but not always, featured noble families behaving badly.

Okay, maybe they weren’t all of them quite as good as Miss Austen’s work, but a number of them have been proving to hold up surprisingly well.  And they’re available online.  For free.

Help.  I may never get out of the nineteenth century again.  But would that be a bad thing, really?

For instance, there’s GRETNA GREEN or The Elopement of Miss D— With a Gallant Son of Mars, from 1821, which I read while working on my upcoming book, THE ACCIDENTAL ABDUCTION (out real soon now).  This is exactly what it says on the label, the story of a young woman eloping to Gretna Green with her True Love.  The Hero is a stalwart young officer, the younger son of a noble family brought onto hard times because of his brother’s bad habits.  The Heroine is a young heiress, whose irritable father has an abhorrence of officers, imagining them all to be fortune hunting cads.  Her chaperone is her Spinster Aunt of a Certain Age and her rival is a wealthy Widow of Allurements.  We’ve got star-crossed lovers, secret missives going astray, moral comeuppance, comedy, rope-ladders, multiple runaways, rescues, evil rivals and villainesses, and a happy ending.

I got very wrapped up in this book.  It has got plenty of twists and turns and genuine danger and narrow escapes.  We’ve got more villains than a modern romance novel, and a few harsh perils of a sort you don’t see much any more.  The Hero and Heroine kept me engaged, and because I’m like that, I adored the rich and rambling language.

I will say there are some problems with this book.  As I said up there, it does ramble.  The scenes of the arguments between the Father and the Aunt go on at a length that can try the patience of the modern reader.  The author clearly didn’t have any use for the Irish, or the Scots, which we can kind of laugh at now.  His attitude toward the African-American character (yes, really), however, is cringe inducing, so if you do seek this one out, be warned about that.

But for the lover of romances, history, old books and details of the Regency period, it’s a lot of fun.