I’m reading what, for crying out loud…

My grandmother, who gave me a lot of my favorite books when I was growing up, was a reader. Their house in Davy had a lot of coffee table books, places that my grandparents had traveled, but if you wanted to read, you had to dig into my grandmother’s office, a room akin to Fibber McGee’s closet, and you didn’t enter lightly. Piled high with giftwrap, boxes, junk mail, and Christmas cards… when you opened the door, my grandmother’s collection of Regency Romances tumbled out on you.

I think she may have been lonely – their old home had been in the heart of Coconut Grove; she was part of the Junior League, and went for lunch at the Yacht Club, and family lived nearby. But, in Davy, they lived in that big silent house, where she was alone all day (my grandfather spent his days in a stand-alone office 1/4 mile down the driveway). When family was around, she came alive but, when I had dinner alone with the two of them, they could go a whole meal without him saying a single word to her, other than to criticize. So she lost herself in Regency Romances.

“Are those the ones with Fabio?” My husband asked. No, definitely not. (Fabio, for you youngsters, didn’t always huck imitation butter; he got his start as a shirtless male model on the cover of romances that were decidedly not Regencies.)

Regencies sort of ripped off Jane Austen. Taking place in England during the Napoleonic wars, they often featured a woman who, for some reason, is disinclined toward or ineligible for marriage, due to social or financial status; sometimes because her debut on the marriage mart was delayed due to illness of herself or a relative. She finds herself married to a man above her station or coming into proximity of a man that she doesn’t really like because, like Mr. Darcy, he’s a bit of a snob.

Regencies came in several flavors: sad ones where the heroine is deserted by her family or orphaned, where her brother or other paterfamilias insists that she must marry someone abusive; militant ones where she is determined to change the debutante scene; and – like Miss Armstead – the madcap heroine one, where she gets herself into crazy situations, often at the expense of the very serious hero, and has to be rescued. (These are my favorite and, based on my grandmother’s collection, hers, too.) These were low-sex romances, safe for a preteen girl to read. They’re definitely not what you would call a “bodice ripper;” there’s little in the way of violence, maybe a little kissing and many smoldering glances.

The plot of this one makes use of some of the typical tropes. Miss Armstead (Frankie, to her friends), lives in the country. Her parents are land-rich with middle-class sensibilities. Frankie has a a crush on Evelyn, the older son of her Father’s best friend and neighbor, but Evelyn drinks, gambles, and plays around with women – and neither father approves of the match. Instead, they want Frankie to marry Bertie, Evelyn’s younger brother, who hasn’t quite grown up yet. To delay the fixed union while she and Evelyn figure out how to bring his parents around, Frankie tells her father that she is secretly engaged to yet another neighbor, a man about 10 years older than Frankie, who is safely away at war, and whom her father cannot possibly disagree with because he’s a duke and extremely wealthy. When her secret fiance is reported killed, she is forced to go into mourning (“black gloves”) for him.

But of course, he hasn’t been killed – he is rescued, a hero, and returns home to discover, to his surprise, that everyone is gossiping about him (Frankie’s father was too excited to keep the secret), the potential bride he has brought with him, and his neglect of Frankie, his supposed fiancee, a local girl who everyone likes. The truth comes out. He returns to London in a huff. And Frankie is sent, in disgrace, to stay with her glamourous aunt in London. The aunt, lived in France for many years and has impeccable style, and is a widow with a significant inheritance. She buys Frankie a new wardrobe and has her hair cut and teaches her how to behave fashionably. (Transformation is a big trope in these books.) And launches her debutante season.

However, Frankie continues to be thrown together with her “secret fiance” – his city home is next door – and they come to appreciate each other’s characters, although they can’t let each other know that. Of course, Evelyn steals the signature necklace of an aristocratic woman he’s been pursuing and gives it to a high-end prostitute whom he owes money to; she refuses to allow him to buy it back; and he tricks Frankie and Bertie into stealing it back for him. And her perfect plan goes fabulously wrong, putting her reputation and future at risk.

Regencies are funny, romantic, escapist. The madcap heroines are spunky and outspoken, and refuse to play by society’s rules for what women should or shouldn’t be, for how they should behave. The heroines don’t change much in these books – they find love even while being madcap, or sad, or on a mission; the men they eventually marry (or accidentally married before) just come to appreciate their personalities. These books always have happy endings.

Say what you like about formula fiction, some of these are pretty clever. Yes, they have to include the problem, the transformation, the battles between the hero and heroine, and a happy ending that ends with an engagement – or, if they got married by mistake earlier in the book, with a reconciliation. But I’m a believer that rules and structure can sometimes inspire creativity.

Yeah, sometimes you need a happy ending.

I went back to my grandparent’s house a few years ago, when I was in Ft. Lauderdale on business. The Davy government seized their property under eminent domain and made it into a public park; they filled in the swimming pool, and leveled Easter Hill – where my grandparents hosted Easter breakfast for hundreds of people – although they left the bell that we rung to call people to eat. The house is now a rec center; there was a party there that day and I snuck in. They had torn down the walls, ripped up the sea-foam carpeting and peeled down the breakfast room wallpaper, a sweet blue toile with Regency ladies walking with their beaus in gardens. The house seemed smaller. My grandmother would have loved that they were having a party there. But she would have been unhappy that all the careful decor she had preserved so carefully while they lived there, was gone.

Yeah, sometimes you need a happy ending.