Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Name Changes

Post moved to Susanna Fraser blog.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Knights (and Baronets)

Post moved to Susanna Fraser blog.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Courtesy Titles, Part 2

Post moved to Susanna Fraser blog.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Courtesy Titles, Part 1

Post moved to Susanna Fraser blog.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: a new series

This post, and others in the series, are being moved to my Susanna Fraser author blog.

Napoleon

As my longtime readers know, I am not fond of Napoleon. Paul Johnson is likewise not fond of Napoleon. But as I read his brief 2002 biography (Napoleon: A Life), I found myself wanting to defend the emperor. Johnson sees Napoleonic France as the prototype of the modern totalitarian state, and therefore Napoleon as the progenitor of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and the like. Possibly it's because I've seen far too many sloppy comparisons to Hitler and Nazism over the past few years, but that left me rolling my eyes. He might have a point if he didn't insist on exaggerating it, tossing around the "evils" and the Hitler references, and blaming ideas whose time had come on one person.

Despite my annoyance with the author, I'm not sorry I read the book. When you're researching someone intensively for your own writing, it never hurts to get another perspective, even if you disagree with it. But if you read one Napoleon biography, this shouldn't be your choice. I'm not sure what should be--I like Evangeline Bruce's Napoleon and Josephine and Christopher Hibbert's Napoleon: His Wives and Women, but those focus too heavily on his personal life to be comprehensive. If I find one that leaves me nodding and saying, "Yes, that's him," I'll be sure to let my five loyal readers know. :-)

Napoleon: His Wives and Women

Christopher Hibbert writes in-depth, readable biographies, but he doesn't engage in much speculation on the inner workings of his subjects' souls. Napoleon: His Wives and Women (2003) is no exception. It's probably the best route, but I found myself wanting him to express opinions so I could argue with them or approve them as the case warranted.

This shouldn't be your first biography of Napoleon, since, as the title indicates, it focuses on his personal life rather than affairs of state and war. It assumes a certain knowledge of the major events and figures that a casual reader wouldn't have. But it's a good supplement if you're interested in the man and/or the era to get a detailed look at a part of Napoleon's life most histories barely explore. It didn't make me like Napoleon any better than I did going in, but I do feel like I have a fuller picture of his life and personality.

Kensington Palace: The Official Illustrated History

I must admit that I did not read every single word of Kensington Palace (Edward Impey, 2003). A few scenes in my WIP are set there, so I got this book through interlibrary loan in hopes of finding floor plans and images to help me make the setting more vivid. So I skimmed through the details of William and Mary's and Anne's reigns, and I didn't pay much attention to anything after my story's time period.

The floor plans weren't as detailed as I hoped, so I'll just have to fudge a bit. Which may be just as well, because a whole page of, "She sneaked from Room X to Room Y, then ducked out into the passage because there was no connecting door to Room Z," would make for dull reading. But I did get my visuals, so I think I'll be able to make my scenes evoke Kensington Palace rather than Random Great House.

The Illustrious Dead

When you think of Napoleon's invasion of Russia (as I'm sure you often do, doesn't everyone?), you probably think it failed because of the Russian winter, hunger, and the Russians' clever, though somewhat accidental, strategy of leading the Grande Armee deep into their territory, too far from supplies or reinforcements. All those, along with a strange combination of lassitude and hubris on Napoleon's part, certainly played a role. But The Illustrious Dead (Stephan Talty, 2009) gives the lion's share of the credit to typhus, showing how the disease burned its way through the army from the very beginning of the campaign to when the handful of survivors staggered into Germany.

This is a good, readable work of popular military history. I'd recommend it to just about anyone interested in the era--it's straightforward and clear enough for those who haven't read much military history, but the focus on typhus gives a different spin for those who already know Napoleon's campaigns well. And Talty knows how to make nonfiction history read like a page-turning novel.

I've never been an admirer of Napoleon's, but I try very hard to understand why so many people have been, then and now. And sometimes I think I've almost grasped it until I read another account of the invasion of Russia. So much death and destruction for the sake of one man's ambition and hubris.

The annual Powell's haul

Roughly once a year I make it down to Portland, and I can't come here without visiting Powell's--an amazing, ginormous bookstore with both used and new stock. It's one of my favorite places in the whole world. I could easily lose myself in there for days.

Today I ended up with $56 in store credit from the used books I'd brought down to trade in, so I kinda went wild (spending way more than $56, but I only get there once a year). Here's the list. It's almost all nonfiction, because I headed up to the history department first and easily could've spent my entire budget and then some just on the Britain and Ireland shelves.

THE WORLD OF DANIEL O'CONNELL, by Donal McCartney - eventually my WIP world will include Ireland, so I'm starting to stock up on sources on Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries.

THE ART OF WAR, Antoine Henri Jomini - if I'm going to invent Napoleonic-era battles for my alternative history, I might as well study the actual theory of the era.

WEAPONS AND EQUIPMENT OF THE NAPOLEONIC WARS, Philip Haythornthwaite - I'm always seeking books to help me with the everyday details of my characters' lives.

NAPOLEON, Paul Johnson - a brief biography, and I'm hoping a balanced one. Napoleon tends to be portrayed as either the greatest man EVER or as lacking any redeeming qualities whatsoever. The former makes me roll my Anglocentric Wellington-fangirl eyes forever, while the latter...I'm sorry, you just can't compare Napoleon to Hitler. Not even the same league. Really. Which would you rather live in, Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany?

THREE NAPOLEONIC BATTLES, Harold T. Parker - analyzes the battles of Friedland, Aspern-Essling, and Waterloo.

ORGANIZING FROM THE INSIDE OUT, Julie Morgenstern - a resource for my ongoing struggle to organize my stuff and my life.

THE COMPLETE WRITER'S GUIDE TO HEROES & HEROINES, Tami D. Cowden, Caro LaFever, Sue Viders - a book on archetypes. I was at a presentation based on this book and found it intriguing.

PASSION & PRINCIPLE: THE LOVES AND LIVES OF REGENCY WOMEN, Jane Aiken Hodge - because I'm not only interested in war.

THE YEAR OF LIBERTY: THE HISTORY OF THE GREAT IRISH REBELLION OF 1798, Thomas Pakenham - more Irish history.

FOOD MATTERS, Mark Bittman - decided I needed my own copy.

NAPOLEON AND HIS COLLABORATORS, Isser Woloch - how Napoleon became First Consul and then Emperor, and who supported him along the way

THE BOOKSELLER'S DAUGHTER, Pam Rosenthal - my one fiction purchase, a historical romance set in France just before the Revolution.

HOW TO GROW A NOVEL, Sol Stein - looked like it might have good advice for my style of writing.

ACCESS 2003 BIBLE, Cary N. Prague, Michael R. Irwin, Jennifer Reardon - hopefully contains the solutions to a pesky database problem or two at work.

Oh, and I got my daughter all the Martha Speaks books that she doesn't yet have.

Royal Mourning and Regency Culture

To be honest, I skimmed Royal Mourning and Regency Culture (Stephen C. Behrendt, 1997). It's research for my alternative history, in which, among other things, I have a British royal death or two. It occurred to me as I was revising that I know next to nothing about the relevant mourning and funerary customs. The nearest real royal death to my fictional ones was the 1817 death in childbirth of the Princess Charlotte, at the time the only legitimate grandchild of George III and therefore after her father the Prince Regent heir presumptive to the throne. Her son was stillborn, and the double tragedy set off a series of belated marriages among her uncles, ultimately leading to the birth of the future Queen Victoria.

Behrendt's book looks at the cultural response to Charlotte's death as an early example of the kind of public grief we've seen in our time over figures like JFK or Princess Diana. He analyzes everything from poetry to commemorative prints to essays tying Charlotte's life and death to the post-Waterloo uneasiness and social upheaval facing England at the time. Reasonably interesting stuff, if you're a research geek like me...but I still ended up skimming, since I was seeking general principles to apply to my fictional deaths rather than trying to learn all the details of poor Charlotte's real one. (Charlotte's death resonates with me more than you'd expect for an obscure royal who died well before I was born, because it's highly possible she had preeclampsia, which there but for the grace of modern medicine would've killed me, and I first read about her case not long after my daughter was born.)

The Recollections of Rifleman Harris

I finally got around to reading The Recollections of Rifleman Harris (Christopher Hibbert, ed., 1970), one of the better-known Peninsular War memoirs. Harris was a shepherd and cobbler from Dorsetshire who was drafted into the militia (think National Guard, only they couldn't be required to serve outside of Great Britain and Ireland) and then chose to enlist in the 95th Rifles. He only served in the earliest part of the Peninsular campaign--after the first expeditionary force was evacuated in 1809, he was sent on the ill-fated Walcheren expedition and was one of many men who came down with what was probably malaria. He never recovered enough to resume active service, and was working in London as a cobbler years after Waterloo when he encountered Henry Curling, the officer who set down his story. (Harris himself was probably illiterate.)

Harris's memories are rambling and disjointed; Christopher Hibbert's occasional footnotes and clarifications are a big help. Even so, I'd only recommend it to readers who know a fair amount about the Peninsular War. It's a striking read for its calm, straightforward narrative of the horrors and privations of war, and the mixture of inhumanity and grace in how people respond to it. It did sadden me a bit to see Harris completely buy into the evils of the system he served in--he believed flogging was a necessary evil and preferred officers to be from the gentry or the aristocracy. It doesn't surprise me to see beneficiaries of such a system defend it, but I like to think people like Harris would've been itching to, oh, fight the power and stick it to The Man. Of course, if they had, the course of British history would've been very different, but reading that kind of servility still makes me wince.

Wellington: Pillar of State

Wellington: Pillar of State (Elizabeth Longford, 1972) held my attention, but it also saddened me. It's about Wellington's life post-Waterloo, which I've paid less attention to, given that I became a Wellington fangirl via my interest in the Napoleonic Wars, and that it's Sir Arthur Wellesley the brilliant young general who shows up in my alternative history WIP, not Wellington the aging reactionary Tory politician. I'd describe Wellington as the last great 18th century Englishman, but he never quite got into synch with the post-1815 world despite living till 1852 and staying active politically right up until his death. And his politics frustrate me, 21st century American Democrat that I am--I want to jump in the nearest TARDIS, go back to 1820 or so, and shake some sense into the man, because, dang it, he was far too intelligent to have such rigid ideas!

Still, despite disagreeing with him, I don't admire him any less. I wish more people on both sides of my country's politics had his rock-solid integrity and willingness to put the public good as he perceived it ahead of ambition. And while I didn't enjoy this book as much as the first volume of Longford's biography (Wellington: The Years of the Sword), because there's just no way in the WORLD I'm going to find 19th century Parliamentary minutia as interesting as the Peninsular War and Waterloo, she made the human interest so strong and lively that I managed to soldier through all the Whig and Tory wrangling.

Napoleon in Love

Every once in awhile I make myself read a book that disagrees with my own settled opinion of the historical figures I'm focusing on in my alternative history WIP. I figure it keeps me honest by forcing me to at least acknowledge that other perspectives exist.

Napoleon in Love (RF Delderfield, 1959), a history of Napoleon's marriages and major affairs, is one of those books. I'm no admirer of Napoleon's. I swear Delderfield had a man-crush on him. He gets all huffy and wounded over anyone who ever betrayed or double-crossed Napoleon, which struck me as a bit rich, to say the least, because it's not like Napoleon never used anyone for his own selfish interests, oh no!

That said, it really is good for me to be reminded that not everyone hates my antagonist. :-) A warning to anyone who comes across this book, though--it really shows its age. Delderfield indulges in broad stereotypes of just about every ethnicity other than the French and the English. And while I don't think Marie Louise was the sharpest knife in the drawer, I don't think she could've possibly been as bovinely dull as Delderfield accuses her of being.

Still, as much as this book annoyed me, I don't regret reading it. It's a colorful view of Napoleon's court, and I got some potential ideas for the WIP.

Intermediate Fencing starts tomorrow...

I haven't blogged about fencing as much as I wanted to, but this weekend the online writers' class I'm taking gave us an exercise where we were asked to write about anything we were passionate about, as long as it wasn't politics or religion. Since that took my obsession with checking fivethirtyeight.com off the map, I wrote the following:

Sweat pours in a river down my spine. It’s at least 80 degrees in this hall, and I’m wearing sweatpants, a plastic chest protector and a long-sleeved jacket over my t-shirt, a masked helmet with a neck guard, and a thick glove on my right hand. My sword hand.

At any other time I hate to sweat. But this sweat comes in pursuit of a dream and a physical connection to the stories I love to tell.

I’m not a natural fencer. Even if I weren’t overweight, I wouldn’t be the ideal build for the sport, and my hand-eye coordination is average at best. I lose as many bouts as I win, and tonight I’ll go home with a cross-shaped array of bruises on my upper arm from my most ignominious defeat.

But nothing beats the rush of striding across the room, sword in hand, or of standing poised en garde at the beginning of a bout, or the thrill of scoring a touch against a more slender and athletic opponent.

And when I lift my blade in salute, I’m not just offering the traditional courtesy to my opponent and our coach. I’m saluting the little girl I was thirty years ago, who used to pose before her mother’s full-length mirror with her brother’s West Point saber in hand. I’m honoring the hero of my novel, the real man whose life I’m turning upside down for the sake of my alternative history—a man to the manner of the sword born, who learned all these feints, parries, and ripostes as a normal part of his education as an officer and a gentleman, who wielded his sword in battle. When I hold a sword, the barrier of two hundred years between us thins. I touch history and bring it into the present.

Wellington at War (Book #83)

Wellington at War: 1794-1815 (Antony Brett-James, ed., 1961) is a selection of letters and general orders from throughout Wellington's military career. They're mostly on military topics, but not entirely--there's plenty of politics, occasional forays into finance, some gossip and scandal, mostly within Wellington's own family. It's great primary source material for those who are familiar with his biography, but Brett-James' commentary isn't enough grounding to make sense of the letters for anyone who isn't.

Fusiliers (Book #81)

It's easy to forget how interconnected the past is. All too often we study it as a set of discrete episodes rather than as a flowing river of time.

I knew that the American Revolution was among the causes of the French Revolution, both as an inspiration and because France's war expenditures led to a financial crisis. But until I read Fusiliers (Mark Urban, 2007) I hadn't fully considered that the army of Wellington was only about 30 years removed from the army of Cornwallis.

By focusing on a single regiment that served all the way from Lexington and Concord to Yorktown, Urban explores the reality of the British army--as opposed to the caricature of redcoated automatons we learned about in school--and how it changed in response to the challenges of the Revolution. If anything, the army improved considerably. It just didn't do them any good, because it's pretty much impossible to hold a large, hostile territory far from your home base with a small force, no matter its quality. The British effort was probably doomed from Saratoga onward, and certainly was once France entered the war. But the tactics they adopted to go on winning battles even as they lost the war ultimately bore fruit in the Peninsular War and at Waterloo.

Incidentally, I'm also reading a collection of Wellington's wartime correspondence. In one letter, he attributes just about everything that went wrong (from his perspective!) from 1776 on to party politics in England--the loss of the American colonies, the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, etc. His thesis seems to be that if the British powers-that-be had put country first instead of party, everything would've turned out differently. Who knows, maybe he's right. He did live through it all, though he was only six when the American Revolution started. Still, if I'm right about Saratoga, that wasn't a political blunder. Howe didn't march to reinforce Burgoyne, and so the Americans had a three-to-one advantage. But, if the British had been willing to come to a quick accommodation at that point instead of stretching the war out, the French would've stayed out of it, and then who knows how the next few decades would've turned out? Somehow I doubt that's what Wellington had in mind, though, because that's a Whiggish approach--it was the Tories, and especially the king, who wanted to continue the war. And even if Wellington didn't admit it, I'm pretty sure his non-partisan world would've involved everyone agreeing with the Tories. I love the man, but he had some obnoxious political views. (Stupid space-time continuum, because I'd dearly love to actually argue this one with the real Wellington instead of just shaking my head at the letters he left behind and quoting Barack Obama at him about how ALL of us love our country.)

Wellington as Military Commander (Book #76)

Wellington as Military Commander (Michael Glover, 1968) is a good survey of Wellington's command style--his favored tactics and how he interacted with subordinates, allies, and his government--for those who are already familiar with the Peninsular War and the Waterloo campaign. More than other Wellington books I've read (and let's face it, I've read a lot of Wellington books) it emphasizes the challenges he faced in cooperating with allies and getting what he needed from the British government. Which, incidentally, is why it's hard to do a direct comparison of Wellington and Napoleon--a military commander who is also head of state has powers one acting under a constitutional government and in concert with allies simply cannot command.

On Wellington (Book #67)

On Wellington: the Duke and his Art of War (Jac Weller, 1998) is a collection of essays and articles compiled after Weller's death. It's sort of an odd read. It assumes a certain level of knowledge of military history in general and Wellington's career in particular, but since the essays are short and topical, I didn't learn much I didn't already know. Probably the most interesting section, because it was new to me, was a discussion of the impact of Napoleon's and Wellington's tactics and strategies on the Civil War, followed by a speculation on how Gettysburg might've turned out if Wellington had commanded the Confederate force. (He thinks the South would've won the battle and possibly the war--it seems like that in Weller's view of the world, there's no military problem that couldn't be solved by time-traveling Wellington. He might be right about Gettysburg, since Lee's hands-off command style just didn't work after Stonewall Jackson died, IMHO. But I can't agree with an earlier essay that suggests that Wellington could've turned things around for the US in Vietnam. There are limits to what one man can do.)

Wellington and His Army (Book #64)

Wellington and His Army (Godfrey Davis, 1954) assumes reader familiarity with the general course of the Peninsular War and Waterloo Campaign, focusing instead on Wellington's personality, his interactions with his officers and men, and everyday life with the army. I didn't learn much new from it, but I do try to keep myself immersed in this kind of book, because these are the people and the world I write about. (More or less. Since I'm doing alternative history, everything is a little...different.)

One thing that struck me with this book is the degree to which the archetypal Wellington story involves some soldier getting out of a flogging or worse by making him crack up. A typical example: a soldier in the act of stealing honey is accosted by Wellington, who asks him where he got that. The soldier, not recognizing the army's commander because his face is half-hooded against the bee stings, tells him where to find the hives, and helpfully urges him to hurry up if he wants some, because there's already a crowd helping themselves. Wellington laughs, and the soldier goes unpunished. There must be at least half a dozen similar incidents reported in books like this, and of course it's impossible to tell at this distance which are real and which are apocryphal. I'm struck (probably because I'm geeky and strange) by the contrast with, say, the archetypal Robert E. Lee story, which usually involves him showing semi-anonymous mercy and personal care to some soldier, whether Confederate or Union--the Lee stories emphasize that general's reputed saintliness, while the Wellington stories instead undercut his reputation for seriousness and strictness.

(Yeah, I know. I'm geeky and strange.)