Skip to main content

The Hounds and Sheep of a Regency Romance -- Uh?

 Sometimes a writer just has to do some silly stuff.  Why?  Because as we create our stories the imp within demands some quality time, and because you want to pepper your story with believable facts that help embellish an historical romance with a degree of veracity.  

Several of my historical romances have these little streaks of humor and/or facts, so in Wicked Wagers I included a few odd but fun touches:  first, the Irish Water Spaniel.  In reading through one of the many issues of Country Living (the UK edition) I tend to hoard, I came across an article about this somewhat rare breed.  But, I must confess, it was the image of these wild and wooly hounds that made me want to incorporate them into the romance.


Pretty cute, uh?  These dogs are excellent retrievers for waterfowl, which was perfect for the area that WW is set -- on the west coast in the Whitehaven area, not far from the Lake District. 

How can you resist a dog that looks like this, I ask you?  And when I did some research on this breed, they indeed were being cultivated in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century, so it's feasible that Julia Montford, the heroine, could have been involved in breeding these hunting dogs.  According to the American Kennel Club, they are friendly, even a bit clownish.

And now to the sheep . . . .  Say hello to the Lincoln Longwool breed, first introduced in The Viscount and the Virgin, when the viscount struggles to rebuild his estates after his older brothers had almost destroyed them. 

According to Wikipedia, the Lincoln is the largest British sheep, developed specifically to produce the heaviest, longest and most lustrous fleece of any breed in the world.  The versatile fleece is in great demand for spinning, weaving and many other crafts, even to this day.  

Talk about having a bad hair day . . . ;-)  

 

And finally, the Herdwick sheep, brought to England during the Viking invasions over 600 years earlier.  This is a hardy breed perfect for the long, harsh winters in the mountainous area of the Lake District.  They've even been known to eat their own fleece to stay alive during long winters, if necessary. 


I decided to add them to WW because Ben's older brother, Charles, is now the squire and has a herd of 500 head of Herdwicks, common to the area.  Between Gabriel Montford and Charles Burton, these two characters are always "wagering" on their herds as they lay bets on Ben and Julia's courtship throughout the romance.  Must be a guy thing?



Well, so there you have it.  Hounds and sheep in a Regency romance.  Pretty exciting stuff, right?  Hey, writing is a very solitary life, so I guess I need to get out more . . .

"I suppose we are all getting to look mildly fictional -- "
E.B. White

HAPPY READING!









Comments

Popular posts from this blog

More Secondary Characters

As promised, I'm back with some tidbits of info on another favorite secondary character who has appeared in several of my Regency romances -- the Dowager Lady Rutherford. I needed a character who would balance out Lady Caro (see last week's blog entry), someone who was smart as a whip, tough and yet hiding a soft side.  The dowager seemed to fit the bill for when she first appears in Snowbound Seductions , she's ornery, feared by all (even the duke) and willing to use her ebony cane like a Scottish claymore. So, the first British actress who visually inspired me, mostly for the dowager's physical attributes is Phyllida Law.  If you're an Acorn TV or Brit Box fan, many of you will recognize Ms. Law. Phyllida Law She's appeared in so many series and movies, and is also known as Emma Thompson's mother.  She is a wonderful actress and, to me, captures how I visualize the dowager. And in my work-in-progress, Wicked Wagers , we'll see a b...

Top 25 Reads for 2018

2018 was a busy year for reading -- lots of great books, so little time, right? Although I must admit that this year I was immersed in Susan Mallery's Fools Gold series, as well as Jill Shalvis' Lucky Harbor and Heartbreaker Bay series --  and I do mean totally immersed.  These two writers can world build like no other!  But for the sake of the Top 25, I am putting Mallery and Shalvis in their own kingdom and let you decide. Also, please note that I am not driven by the NYT Bestseller List or any other "lists" -- I tend to like to find my writers in a more organic way, mainly by browsing in real brick-and-mortar bookstores and libraries, so some are "newish" and some are older.  If I'm starting a new series, I like to start at the beginning, which means I'm reading past bestsellers. So, here's my top 25 titles that I heartily recommend to readers (broken down by genre / subgenre): Regency Romance: Sherry Thomas, His at Night Tessa D...

Sources of Inspiration

I've been working on my first Regency romance novel and, although I've read most of Jane Austen and seen so many of the excellent BBC movie variations, one still needs a bit of inspiration when working through the writing. It's usually those small details, descriptive of the landscape or the manor house, that gives a work that added level of veracity, of impact for the reader.  Why else would readers want historical romance?  I have to think that it's the time period that intrigues, a bit like a time tunnel.  Go ahead, pick your period -- there's probably a romance set in each one. That's why I love Pinterest.  If you can control the time spent on the great "P" -- and that's a big "if" -- there's so much out there to help spark those imaginative ideas or get a writer over the hurdle of writer's block.  Here's a few that I chose to help keep me churning out those words: Image captured from Pinterest Wouldn't thi...