to post a link to this article I wrote on the playlist for A SPEAR OF SUMMER GRASS and the women of speakeasy jazz. Enjoy!

I hope you enjoyed the collection of goodies that went up on Tuesday. Today’s round-up starts with one of my favorite royals to watch.

*Sheikha Mozah

*When Good Things Happen to Others (via Tiny Buddha)

*Punching Up

*If I Had a Time Machine

*From Sleeping Beauty to Lady Gaga–the female trickster in literature

And please note on May 19 (Sunday) I’ll be chatting about A SPEAR OF SUMMER GRASS at Writerspace at 9pm eastern! This is a chat solely dedicated to SPEAR, so we have an hour to discuss whatever you want to talk about–come chat with me!

Hey, chickens! Back from Houston where I expect I had a wonderful time. (This week’s blogs are being written and loaded well in advance because I’ve got multiple deadlines when I return. I have a novella and a proposal due by the end of the month, revisions due July 1, and a daughter graduating from high school this month as well as travel lined up for SPEAR events.)

So today I’m going to be Linky Linkerson, the mayor of Linkieville. These are tasty things I found online that I thought you’d enjoy. Happy surfing!

*10 Incredible Images of Death

*Historical Figure for the 21st Century

*Virtual Victorian

*Vice and Virtue

*Sweet Violet Syrup Recipe

*How to Converse Properly

*Gin Lane Gazette

*Turning the Pages–the Royal Collection Trust

Hola, chickens! Flying post to give you links to seven of the giveaways for A SPEAR OF SUMMER GRASS.

*Confessions of a Book Addict

*Tome Tender

*Cocktails and Books

*Mod Vintage Life

*Book Cellar

*Brazen Bookworm

*Beth Fish Reads

So today I’m not here–adios, chickens! I’m on my way to Houston for tomorrow’s signing at Murder by the Book. Details are on the Tours page, but here’s something you won’t find there: IT’S A FLAPPER AFFAIR WITH PITH HELMETS AND MIMOSAS. Yeah, you will want to come. Also, if you want a signed book and can’t make it, just phone up the awesome peeps at MBTB today and request a book. They will make that happen for you–mostly by chaining me in the back room with a pen in my hand and not giving me mimosas until every book is signed. (Booksellers are PROS, y’all.)

Anyway, today is about Ryder. There’s a wee discussion of him on my guest blog today at Writerspace, specifically about how he and Delilah got their names. Since I’m writing this ahead of time, I can’t perform link magic, but if you pootle over to www.writerspace.com and click on the blogs you’ll find it, I promise!

Ryder was FUN to create. I started by reading as much as I could get my hands on about the early settlers and hunters in British East Africa. Most of them were hard-drinking, large-living, fearless womanizers. (Not all, but most.) And most of them had the distasteful habit of shooting wildlife–LOTS OF IT. Teddy Roosevelt’s safaris with his sons will absolutely turn your stomach. But there were some men who were actually at the forefront of the conservancy movement that was just in its infancy in the 1920s. Big game hunting was a tremendously popular pastime among the rich and famous–everyone from Hemingway to TRM Howard ventured out to bag game, and it was a particular favorite of royalty. But hunters could also turn conservationist, and many of them accompanied filmmakers and natural historians like Martin Johnson and Carl Akeley on their expeditions.

Two of the most famous big game hunters in Africa–both connected at least peripherally to the Happy Valley set–were Denys Finch Hatton and Bror Blixen. Very different men, they were both involved with Karen Blixen and Beryl Markham, two of the most interesting and dynamic women in Africa. I took Finch Hatton’s love of poetry and flying, and from Bror I took his way with women and his coolness under fire. I gathered up bits and pieces of all these men to assemble Ryder–with a few unique touches all his own. (Such as his Maasai and Turkana bracelets.) WDM Bell was a big game hunter who left Africa for the Yukon to participate in the Gold Rush; I took Ryder on the journey in reverse. Making him Canadian created a nice pairing with Delilah’s half-American heritage; both of them are newcomers to Africa and the colony’s ways.

As to his name, J. Ryder White, it’s a series of jokes. First, Ryder is an homage to the godfather of the adventure novel genre–the great H. Rider Haggard. Haggard essentially created the archetypal character of the “Great White Hunter”, and there is not an adventure writer after him who doesn’t owe him something. Edgar Rice Burroughs, Conan Doyle, even Elizabeth Peters were among the great writers influenced by him. (If his name doesn’t ring a bell, his most famous novels are KING SOLOMON’S MINES and SHE. Think Allan Quatermain.) The alternate spelling of Ryder is due to Ryder Hesjedal, the Canadian cyclist, since I was watching the Tour de France at the time–an homage to my character’s countryman. (It also gives a nod to BRIDESHEAD REVISITED–a more understandable one than calling a character Aloysius…)

The choice of White as his last name was a way of thumbing my nose at the fact that he is a “white” hunter–and by the end of the book not a good one. He is no longer willing to hire himself out to shoot whatever his clients want. (This is a trend we saw beginning in FAR IN THE WILDS.) By the end, he’s committed to conservancy, to figuring out a way to preserve the wildlife and the land. Of course, wildlife management is a hideously complicated business; even today debate still rages about the best way to manage the conflicting interests of animals, land, and people, but Ryder has a stubborn belief he can do better than the average colonial, and having spent most of his life there, he feels obligated to try.

If you want to read up on some of the influences who went into creating Ryder, the bios of Denys Finch Hatton by Sara Wheeler and Errol Trzebinski are thorough. Trzebinski also wrote a bio of Beryl Markham that detailed her relationships with several of the prominent men in the colony.

Also helpful was SAFARI by Bartle Bull. It’s a comprehensive and sometimes stomach-turning history of the tradition of safari. And the diaries of Peter Beard are beyond incredible. Beard, an internationally acclaimed photographer, has spent most of his adult life in Africa, and during that time he has kept lavish visual diaries. They are albums of his photographs loaded with ephemera of his life–feathers, blood, egg shells, bones. They are extraordinary, and a few years ago Beard released a two-book set of coffee table books that are photographic facsimiles of the originals. The set is not cheap–they are out of print and the last set I saw went for $400 per volume. But I was able to find them via interlibrary loan, and his other books offer a wonderful insight into his African experiences. THE END OF THE GAME is particularly heart-breaking but beautifully presented.

Alright, my dears–this wraps up the backstory posts on how different characters were created. I LOVE doing the backstory posts; it’s one of my favorite parts of any book’s launch, and I hope you enjoyed them. Since I’m traveling and on deadlines, next week’s posts are already written and loaded, but if you have any questions about research, pop them in the comments, and I’ll write a catch-up post when I’m able. Happy weekend!

I asked earlier this week who people wanted to hear about, and the first reader response was “Dodo, please!” So, for Erin, here’s Dodo…

(Spoilers, ahead!)

The idea for Dodo started to take shape when I read the memoir of Rosina Harrison’s ROSE: MY LIFE IN SERVICE TO LADY ASTOR. Staff memoirs are one of my favorite things in the world to read–largely because they usually shatter a ton of misconceptions about servant-employer relationships. While the upstairs definitely held the power in the relationship and often wielded it with brutal precision, the downstairs had their ways of evening the score. For every Duke of Bedford–a peer who insisted his staff face the wall and remain silent if he approached–there was a Duchess of Marlborough, an aristocrat who suffered agonies when her cook insisted upon sending up ortolans (a dish she hated and considered pretentious) to punish her in front of a large dinner party of titled guests.

Employer-employee relationships varied hugely in intimacy and details. Some mistresses thought nothing of walking around entirely nude in front of their ladies’ maids, while others used them only for fastening outer garments and lacing corsets over chemises. Some men never spoke to their valets about personal matters, others relied upon them to keep the most painfully private secrets. A servant whose attachment to a family was one of long duration might enjoy tremendous privilege in the staff hierarchy and could often get away with breathtaking intimacy.

In contrast to this, the poor relation was the ultimate people pleaser. She–and it always seemed to be a she–was usually too well born to permit actual employment but too poor to support herself as a gentlewoman. And somehow she had failed at her primary job, the securing of a suitable husband. Whether from disinclination or bad luck, she was single and unable to provide for herself. Luckily for her, good birth and societal expectations dictated her family would shelter her, albeit sometimes with very bad grace. (If no family member could be found to take her in, she might take genteel employment as a governess or companion or secretary, but these were usually the last resorts.)

With day cares and rehabilitation centers and retirement homes not yet common, the poor relation was the perfect person to step in and help the harried mother, the invalid, the elderly. Her inclination was not particularly important. She did what she needed to do to keep the wolf from the door. If there weren’t children or an old person to take care of, she might function as a sort of general dogsbody. She would answer letters and take telephone messages. She might make travel arrangements and run errands. She made up the fourth for bridge even when she would have preferred a good book. She made conversation with the “odd man” at a dinner party, and she might have spent her afternoon reading aloud or darning stockings or arranging flowers. If the mistress of the house had no interest in domestic matters, the poor relation might find herself ordering sauces and supervising the cook. In a country household, she might be dispatched to the poor with soup and jam, doing good works while the rest of the family did as they pleased.

Her work was not normally arduous–she might walk lapdogs and sort the family’s post and cut the flowers from the garden–but it must have been mentally exhausting. Without the means to support herself, she was entirely dependent upon the goodwill of the people she lived with, people who might turn her out if they decided she didn’t suit. Her primary job was to please and that meant putting her own inclinations second, regardless of fatigue, illness, or boredom.

While ROSE was of use to me because it detailed Rosina’s reactions to traveling in Virginia with her employer–her observations about race relationships formed the basis for Dodo’s reactions to native Africans in contrast to Delilah’s–she is not based on any one person. The poor relation is an interesting character to explore. I wanted her to be a little downtrodden but I also wanted glimmers of something more to her. I wanted her to WANT to break out of her natural reticence, but I also wanted her to ultimately choose safety and security over adventure. She has the example of Delilah before her, a cautionary tale if ever there was one. She has seen firsthand what following your own desires can do to a person, and she is aghast at the consequences. (It’s no accident that every time Dodo tries to emulate Delilah she pays for it.) It brings up an inherent unfairness in their situation. Dodo wants to be a little like Delilah, to embrace her free spirit and to take chances, but she cannot do so successfully. She simply lacks the backbone (or streak of cruelty or strength, depending upon your viewpoint) and she steps back into the security of the sort of life she really wants.

And in that way, Dodo creates for herself exactly the life she has always craved. She will be her own mistress–after all, one can hardly expect her life partner will be too exacting a presence. She makes her choice with her eyes wide open, and for her own mental health, she leaves Delilah in her past. In doing so, Dodo makes an ending that might just be happier than most other characters in the book. (Erin compared her to Charlotte Lucas, which I hadn’t considered before, but is of course a BRILLIANT comparison. They are both girls with a certain measure of cool common sense. Both are worried about their status and ability to take care of themselves, and both of them scorn their closest friends’ pursuit of passion when they value stability above all else. And they both choose dull clergymen to marry! I don’t know how I missed that, but this is what I love about readers. Great observation, Erin!)

Reader Nicole wanted to know more about Jude. She is perhaps the most damaged character I’ve written. As a victim of domestic abuse, Jude is not in a good place at the point we see her in her story. Against Tusker’s wishes, she married a man who turned out to be an abuser and whom she did not entirely love. Like most victims, she stays with him for a host of complicated reasons. She is grieving for the husband she does not believe is actually dead, and the depression resulting from that unresolved loss has affected her judgment badly, leading her to seek intimacy with a man who is not good for her. Because she does not wholly believe her beloved first husband is dead, her remarriage causes her incredible conflict, including a subconscious belief that it’s alright for her to suffer at her new husband’s hands. Is this healthy? Absolutely not. is it psychologically plausible? Yes. It is common for victims of domestic abuse to stay in the relationship for years–according to the US Dept of Justice, the average victim leaves seven times before making a permanent break with her abuser. And the reasons for staying are as varied as the women themselves. (There may be a statistical picture of the “average” abuse victim, but each situation is different.) In Jude’s case, affection and pity for her abuser, inability to create an escape, and ongoing functional depression contribute to Jude’s delusion that she is somehow managing the abuse and that what she suffers at Anthony’s hands “isn’t that bad”. Is this right? NO. Is it a logical belief for a victim to have while she is in the middle of the abuse cycle? Yes, and certainly in the 1920s when women were far more inclined to hear the societal message that marital violence was sometimes simply a fact of life. That belief that abuse is somehow “under control” is how women stay in bad marriages even now when there are domestic abuse hotlines and shelters in every town. Will Jude stay with Anthony? Not forever. She is smart, capable, and determined, and at some point she will take steps to end the relationship. But that wasn’t part of this story and it isn’t her story yet.

Note: this is unrelated to SPEAR, but one of my favorite reads is ONE PAIR OF HANDS by Monica Dickens. It’s the story of Charles Dickens’ grand-daughter (or perhaps great) who spends a year working as a cook to alleviate her boredom. Highly recommended, not in the least because it demonstrates how easily a clever servant could get the better of an employer.

Since we’re talking backstory this week–FINALLY. I’ve been sitting on these posts for about 18 months!–I thought I’d post the backstory of the book itself: the research. Now, this doesn’t represent all of the research. There were books I got from the library–both regular collections and interlibrary loans. There were documentaries and films I watched, and two full 4″ binders of articles I clipped and downloaded. I particularly enjoyed the Vanity Fair pieces on the second and third generation white Kenyans who have become notorious as their Happy Valley ancestors–sometimes for behavior every bit as reckless.

And speaking of the Happy Valley set, they were–along with landscape itself–the greatest inspiration for SPEAR. They were a unique collection of characters, well-born, hedonistic, and notorious for bad behavior. They were well-heeled and entitled and often actually titled. They were accustomed to money and privilege, moving smoothly from ancestral castles to the latest clubs in London, Paris, and New York. They took lovers and drugs with equal abandon, and most made bad ends. Shootings and overdoses and suicides and cirrhosis all took their toll, and their heyday largely ended in 1941 with the unsolved murder of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll. (My money has always been on Jock Delves Broughton.) Julian Fellowes did a series sometime back of interesting crimes, and he featured the Erroll case–well worth tracking down–and WHITE MISCHIEF is considered the definitive book on the subject if you’re interested. The most intriguing version of the case came courtesy of a book I don’t have in my collection, the memoir of Juanita Carberry, the teenaged daughter of Baron Carbery–the change in spelling came when the baron left off his title. Juanita’s book is out of print, but she was uniquely positioned to comment on the Happy Valley set and its excesses.

And speaking of excesses, one of the most notorious of the Happy Valley group was Kiki Preston, “the girl with the silver syringe”, an heiress with a penchant for drugs. According to gossip at the time, she introduced Prince George–Duke of Kent and fourth son of King George V–to drugs and bore him an illegitimate child during his time in Africa. (Two of George V’s other sons, the future Edward VIII and George VI–father of the present queen–both traveled in Africa before their accessions. George traveled with his wife, but Edward was there as a bachelor prince with his younger brother, the Duke of Kent. His dalliances with married women and his dabbling in cocaine appalled his aides and keeping the stories quiet caused them considerable trouble.) Her drugs of choice were morphine, cocaine, and heroin, and she was famous for ordering them to be delivered via airplane. She was so open with her drug use that Cockie Blixen–second wife of Baron Bror Blixen, the husband of writer Karen–once remarked that Kiki “is very clever with her needle”, a line I gave Helen Farraday to say with regard to Bianca Pemberton. Kiki’s life is tragic but fascinating and a full biography of her is far overdue.

Posted below are the 55 books in my own collection that were useful in writing SPEAR. These make up the bulk of the material I used but certainly not all of it. Several of them–most in fact–are out of print now, but you could track them down via the library or secondhand sellers if you’re interested in reading further.

Gideon was one of the most interesting characters to develop. He is a man with a simpler lifestyle than the white characters in the book–and a man who understands himself and the world around him better since he has his eyes fixed firmly on what he feels to be essential. Coming from a culture that–of necessity–has survival and community as top priorities, he is able to see much of the so-called “civilized” lifestyle for what it is: silly self-absorption. At the same time, he is fascinated by their way of interpreting the world around them. He knows the land intimately and is intrigued by the notion that someone has developed a system to break nature down into building blocks–hence his interest in the period table.

Because he’s not distracted by the demands of the settlers’ expectations of one another, he takes Delilah as he sees her. Unlike the colonists, Gideon looks past the scandalous behavior to the damaged person beneath. His intention in offering friendship is twofold: there is the practical matter of being given the task by his friend and employer of educating Delilah in how to survive in a dangerous land. But on his own initiative, Gideon actually befriends her–for her own benefit more than his. Gideon is a man who knows exactly who he is and who feels comfortable in his role, both within his native community and with the world at large, and it’s from that position of complete self-awareness that he’s able to see that Delilah is a lost soul.

As a member of a culture that is highly oral, he has a keen appreciation for story-telling and poetry. He is intellectually curious and far more articulate about his feelings than a character like Dora with her buttoned-up repression. His behavior fully reflects the culture of his upbringing–a culture that stresses values of community and cooperation and courage.

It is always a dangerous thing to generalize about a culture–the Masai in particular have often been portrayed in the media as doing little but sitting around drinking cow’s blood and practicing vertical jumps. (Neither of those have anything to do with day-to-day Masai life, BTW.) It’s also challenging to present a full picture of a culture most readers aren’t familiar with–if nothing else, it’s difficult to create a credible picture of that culture without stereotyping it in some fashion and yet often those stereotypes are rooted in fact. The notion of a native guide knowing more than the white people has been written. A LOT. And the reason for that is because it’s true. Even now, whites who have lived in Kenya for generations will rely on native guides because they are simply more experienced and better informed. And since SPEAR is a period piece, the guides and porters and farm workers had to be Africans–and I use the word in the context of both genders and multiple tribes of people who are indigenous. It was a common practice amongst hunting safaris and household staffs to mix the tribes. While this could lead to conflicts between tribes with traditionally hostile relationships, it was believed by many whites that allowing too many Africans from one tribe to work together, particularly as porters in a hunting party, could lead to rebellions. (The story in SPEAR of a group of Kikuyu taking out their resentments on a hunter by urinating in his mouth is based on fact.) In all of my research I didn’t find a single household or hunting safari whose employees were taken entirely from one tribe. In the same way that the English at home favored French ladies’ maids and Scottish nannies, in Africa they often preferred Somali butlers and Kikuyu blacksmiths.

Even today, after residing in Kenya for generations, in some quarters whites are not considered to be “real” Africans–largely because there is a segment of the white population that is very happy for it to remain that way. While many other African countries were colonized by farmers, there was a disproportionately large number of aristocrats and upper class settlers who made their way to British East Africa to establish estates for trophy hunting rather than simple working farms. This attitude of colonial entitlement still creates friction today, although there are whites who are making every effort to integrate into Africa life rather than expecting the opposite to occur. For a fascinating story about a second-generation white Kenyan working to preserve ethnic diversity in the area, check out Sveva Gallmann–daughter of enviromentalist and writer Kuki Gallmann–and her work on the Four Generations project. And for the flip side of that coin, google Lord Delamere’s heir, Tom Cholmondeley.

So, it was absolutely essential to make Ryder’s guide and friend a native African. But why Masai? There are many tribes from the Nilotic group that would have made equally good options for Gideon’s ancestry–Kikuyu, Samburu, Turkana. But the more I researched the area and the tribes, the more apparent it became that the Masai were the least respected in many ways. The relationships amongst the tribes are complex and frequently shifting, but to many other native Africans in the colonial period, the Masai were viewed as poor and therefore less worthy of esteem. The fact that this would set Gideon a little apart from the other men employed as guides and porters intrigued me and also provided an opportunity for him to act as a foil to Delilah. When with native African men, he is viewed as “other”, as Delilah is to society back home. But Gideon’s “otherness” in this respect does not trouble him. He is content with who he is and his serenity comes from not particularly valuing what the other men think of him while Delilah is perhaps a trifle less insouciant about her scandals than she pretends.

There are some specific references that went a long way toward helping to build Gideon’s character. First, as a general guide to Masai culture, the book MAASAI by Tepilit Ole Saitoti and Carol Beckwith was invaluable. It details every aspect of their traditions from birth through the coming of age ceremonies to their views on community and gender roles. It also provided Gideon’s birth name–the one he answered to before the church changed it. FACING THE LION: GROWING UP MAASAI by Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton is a fascinating memoir of a young man’s experiences growing up in a traditional culture struggling to survive in a modern world. I also watched–courtesy of the Africa Channel–a number of interviews with Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, the Kenyan writer and professor who has lived in exile for the past 30 years. While the professor is Kikuyu and not Masai–and therefore his upbringing would have been quite different to Gideon’s–his stories about the rivalries between his father’s wives and the friction between them inspired the backstory about Gideon and Moses’ mothers. In his 70s now, he is as creative and eloquent as ever, and Gideon’s intellectual curiosity is reflective of that spirit. (This is the iceberg tip of resources I used, but these were by far the most helpful. I also found MY MAASAI LIFE: FROM SUBURBIA TO SAVANNAH by Robin Wiszowaty to be extremely informative. Wiszowaty left her typical middle-class American life to travel to Kenya and live as a Maasai woman. She discusses the day-to-day reality of life in unglamorous detail. The mention in SPEAR of the jigger worms is a tip of the hat to her.)

Note: while most modern sources use the spelling “Maasai” most references in that period use “Masai” so that was the spelling I chose.

So now that A SPEAR OF SUMMER GRASS is finally out we can start talking about what went into it! Today it’s Delilah’s backstory–specifically, her American backstory. Initially, she was English and I didn’t give it much thought. But then I started digging into the research. I read masses of memoirs, letters, journals, biographies–all dealing with the colonial experience in British East Africa. Elspeth Huxley’s memoirs were particularly helpful, and she detailed how her mother was expected to care for the native Africans who turned up in their yard looking for medical treatment. (One of my pet subjects to study is early female explorers and it was extremely common for indigenous people to appeal to a white female for medical care. Of course it happened with white male explorers too, but I read far more about the women and the frequency of these incidents in their memoirs is intriguing.)

Reading Huxley I started to think about Lisa St. Aubin de Teran, the brilliant writer who went as a teenaged bride to her husband’s sugar plantation in a remote corner of Venezuela. She ended up ministering to the locals, dispensing antibiotics, and treating all manner of ailments. (Her account of this time in THE HACIENDA is one of the most unforgettable books I have ever read. Like Isak Dinesen, she’s an arch fantasist, but in contrast to Dinesen, she’s sympathetic.) It occurred to me that the expectations placed upon Huxley’s mother–and the other white colonial women–and de Teran were almost precisely the same as those of the women whose families owned plantations under the antebellum system in the American South. [Plantation culture is complex, and I feel obligated to note a disclaimer: slavery is abhorrent. Seeking to understand precisely how the system worked does not endorse this system, nor does it minimize the atrocity of it. It is simply our obligation to understand history as fully as possible, and that means acknowledging all aspects of it.]

Under the plantation system, some 70% of slaves interviewed for slave narratives discussed being cared for by the mistress of the plantation. It was part of her expected duties to concern herself with the health and well-being of everyone who lived on the plantation, black or white. I’ve visited several plantations in Virginia and Louisiana, and the role of mistress as caregiver is a fascinating one–and one I realized had interesting implications for Delilah. My goal was to take a woman who does not seem like a nurturer and thrust her in a position of having to care for others, even grudgingly. Whereas a woman from another type of background might rebel at being asked to administer medical care to native tribes, a woman from the plantation culture in the post-War south was the least likely to refuse because she had been reared with the expectation and example of such care.

It also occurred to me that giving her a southern background would also give her a much greater immediate comfort level with Africans. Many travelers to the south were astonished by the level of intimacy in the relationships between blacks and whites–and sometimes these relationships had been of very long duration. The nature of slavery meant that there were sometimes long histories between the family of the owner and the slave families. (They were also sometimes intimately connected by blood thanks to the interference of white men with their slave women.) Following the war, many emancipated slaves chose to remain at the plantation where they had been born. At Laura plantation, the number was 76%–not surprising when you consider the limited resources for first generation freed slaves and the attractions of familiarity. (For an account of an Englishwoman observing the dynamics of white families with their former slaves, Lady Astor’s maid Rose wrote a memoir that discusses their trip to Virginia to visit Lady A’s family, the Langhornes of Virginia. Rose was puzzled and a little put off to find that there was familiarity and even affection between the races in addition to a disturbingly paternalistic attitude on the part of the whites.) While I didn’t have much room to discuss the specifics of Delilah’s upbringing on the plantation, the mentions of the scenes with Granny and her former slaves engaging in some magical practices together gives an idea of the sort of relationship the women of the family had with the freed slaves who elected to remain at Reveille.

So, the first piece of the puzzle was the expectation that a colonial woman in Africa would provide medical care. The second was that as a product of post-War plantation culture, Delilah would be completely familiar with this practice and much more comfortable doing it than the average settler. The third piece was Delilah’s own medical training. Many women in wartime Britain undertook nursing training to help cope with the relentless tide of casualties. Steady nerves and a strong stomach were assets, and Delilah has those–once she gets through her first amputation. Like the men coming home suffering from shell-shock, the women who saw unimaginable horrors in the triage areas and operating theatres were changed by those experiences. To be truly good in a crisis, Delilah has had to learn how to put her feelings aside and assess a situation, then do what needs to be done. Combined with her upbringing on a southern plantation, Delilah is uniquely qualified to fulfill her expected role in Africa.

Further info:

Laura Plantation: if you’re in the NOLA area, a visit is highly recommended. It is an early Creole plantation, very different from Oak Alley, which is just down the road. Not only does Laura have original slave quarters still standing and available to visit, there are fascinating books in the gift shop detailing the origin of the character of Br’er Rabbit, the animal trickster scholars believe was developed out of West African folklore to celebrate the slaves’ ability to outwit his master. (There are also Cherokee versions of the Br’er Rabbit stories and scholars still debate if the tales might have had a Native American start and passed into slave culture via contact with native tribes.) There is also an excellent memoir for sale there that details the history of the plantation–of particular interest to those who enjoy reading about women in plantation culture. The estate often passed through the hands of females, and it was a woman who created and managed the extremely profitable sugar enterprise.

If you’re interested in the lives of female settlers in British East Africa/Kenya try these:

*Anything by Elspeth Huxley. Children tend to have a tremendous eye for detail, and Huxley spent her formative years in British East Africa.

*Anything by Errol Trzebinski. Most people don’t realize that his book, SILENCE WILL SPEAK–a bio of Denys Finch Hatton–was just as much the inspiration for the film “Out of Africa” as Dinesen’s book. His bio of Beryl Markham, aviator and lover of Denys Finch Hatton, is particularly good.

*ISAK DINESEN by Judith Thurman. A MUCH more accurate picture of Karen Blixen that you’ll find in OUT OF AFRICA. Her own account of her life is highly embroidered, and Thurman’s scholarship is painstaking.

*THE BOLTER by Frances Osborne. The bio of Frances’ grandmother, Idina Sackville, the original bolter who left her marriage and children and ended up in Kenya, married to the notorious Joss Hay, Earl of Erroll, whose murder in 1941 remains unsolved to this day.

*THE TEMPTRESS by Paul Spicer. Bio of Alice de Janze, the Earl of Erroll’s mistress and the woman who “claimed” him in death by marking his face with her vaginal secretions as his body lay in the mortuary. She was notorious for her drug use and for shooting a lover in the middle of a Paris train station before turning her gun on herself. She survived and was acquitted.

The most interesting aspect of reading these books is discovering the relationships of these women to each other. Because of their intertwined love affairs, there was a fair bit of sexual jealousy amongst them. Their on-again, off-again friendships, passionate quarrels, and stormy scenes were the stuff of legend amongst the Happy Valley set. (I haven’t even mentioned the garden variety adulterous wives and alcoholics. There are too many of those to count.) Sackville and de Janze were squarely at the heart of the set while Markham and Blixen drifted along the fringes, but they knew all the same people and shared the same gossip–usually about each other. Their letters are full of scandalous stories, and in reading about these women it becomes apparent how alike they were.

None was particularly likeable–thank heavens. A completely likeable character can very easily become a dull character. For interest, a character needs an edge, and these women were SHARP. They were smart, creative, accomplished, and fearless. They flew airplanes and designed houses and grew coffee and hunted lions–and even hand-reared them in the bedroom. They took lovers and left husbands and had children they occasionally forgot about. They also wore beautiful jewels and lined their eyes and colored their hair. In short, they did exactly as they pleased. They took what they loved about being women and elevated it to an art and simply discarded the rest. And that made them perfect role models for Delilah Drummond. Happy reading!

Morning, chickens! Today’s post is a collection of odds and ends. It’s been a whirlwind week for sure. With the release of SPEAR–YAY!–there have been loads of little projects to tie up and some new opportunities to pursue. Loads of good stuff going on, just trying to keep myself organized so I don’t miss anything! For some reason I have a mental block against using my phone’s calendar so I end up jotting everything down on two calendars, neither of which I carry with me. It’s daft. It makes no sense whatsoever. I love the idea of a proper organizer; I desperately wish I could be one of those terribly efficient types with a Filofax, but after a few months, I get tired of lugging it around and it always ends up in a drawer somewhere. Hopeless, really. But perhaps I should begin anew? The trouble is finding anything the right size–say 6×8–and attractive. Why do all these organizational things have to look so GRIM? And if they aren’t grim they’re in alarming florals. Why can’t they make something that looks like it fell out of a 19th-century Parisian attic? Or something a self-respecting flapper wouldn’t mind tucking in her traveling bag? Bah.

So, onto the bits and bobs–first off, if you missed the previous post’s edited announcement, I’ll be in Georgia in March for the Dahlonega Literary Festival. Yay!

Also, it’s GATSBY time, y’all! I probably won’t see the film in the theatre, but I am delighted that the 20s are officially a “thing” now. ALL the better, since this is my preferred setting right now. It’s making it much easier to find research materials and images for my files and collages. Thanks to an FB post, I found a glorious magazine on newsstands now called “The Great Gatsby Era”. It’s a “bookazine”, one of those special editions with a thicker cover that’s produced to hit the market right when there’s a lot of buzz. It’s $9.99 and I found it at Target–and it’s GORGEOUS. I haven’t even let myself read it yet because I plan to savor it with a pot of tea and a lazy weekend afternoon, but if you’re into all things Gatsby, you need to hunt this one down!

And speaking of down (see what I did there?), “Downton Abbey” merchandise, including CLOTHES, is coming soon. Can’t wait to see what they look like! And this is as good a place as any to ask a favor: I’m still researching the 1920s, so if you come across resources–links, books, website, images, etc.–please give me as shout.

Since I’ve gone gluten-free, the biggest challenge has been eating out. Some restaurants–like Abuelo’s and several of our locally-owned eateries–have been amazing, with dedicated gluten-free menus and super-accommodating waitstaff. Others have been abysmal, and still others have just been confusing. Like Panera. For the record, I like Panera. The food is fresh and tasty and much healthier than the usual fast-food fare. And kudos to them for making an effort to offer gluten-free options. Except. It’s on a Hidden Menu. No, I’m not kidding. A bakery chain is probably the last place gluten-free folk would think to look for a menu just for them. SO WHY WOULD YOU HIDE IT? The food looks great and it appeals to a demographic Panera wouldn’t otherwise be able to serve–celiac sufferers, folks with gluten or wheat sensitivites, paleo eaters, Atkins dieters, and people who just don’t want loads of carbs. But they’re keeping it secret? Does not compute for me. But I’m thrilled to know I can find food there beyond just a fruit cup and a bag of chips, so I’ll take what I can get. (Note the Hidden Menu is in addition to the regular menu items that are gluten free–the black bean soup, the tomato soup without croutons, etc.)

New blog find you might want to check out: Lost Splendor. I haven’t had a chance to really dig around in this one, but what I’ve seen is delicious. Just a bit of photographic swoonery to inspire an afternoon.

And this last link comes with a warning. This act from “Britain’s Got Talent” is pure magic. I’ve watched it twice, and both times I was absolutely wrecked. Huge thanks to my friend Sherri for sharing this on FB. Performance starts at 1:25. Bring tissues.