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The Distaff Line
Sep. 15th, 2018 08:07 amAfter Briarley’s success I really intended to focus on Aster Glenn Gray stories & let Jennifer Montgomery fade away into the sunset - so it was probably inevitable that I should be ambushed by the Civil War story I abandoned lo these many months ago, in which a war nurse wounded in spirit and a war veteran wounded in body meet and discover that they can still love and be loved despite the damage that they thought put love forever beyond their reach.
You might imagine that this would be distraction enough, BUT IN FACT in resurrecting the book I have also resurrected a series idea, in which each succeeding book would focus on the daughter of the heroine of the book before. The working series title is The Distaff Line, but probably that could be improved upon.
So you have Harriet Peabody, Civil War nurse, and then her niece-by-marriage/adopted daughter Ellen White, writer of a children’s book series called The Wayfarers, who will possibly fall in love at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (because why wouldn’t you have your heroine fall in love at the World’s Fair if you could) with a geology professor (this part is set in stone for some reason) who is from Germany, or possibly German-occupied Poland, and may or may not be Jewish, I’m still working on these aspects of his identity.
The most important thing is that he needs to have a German last name, because the third book takes place after World War I and the neighbors have been Unpleasant about the family’s connection to Germany. The heroine (as yet unnamed) falls in love with Harriet’s grand-nephew Henri, the grandson of Harriet’s sister Ava and her husband the planter’s son, who was either a white man disowned by his parents because he taught at the freedman’s school where Ava worked and that was just so embarrassing -
Or the mixed-raced son of a French planter in Louisiana (this is the “I have read too much Benjamin January” option) who was sent north for his education and then came south again after the war (in which he fought for the Union and probably got medals and stuff) to teach at a freedman’s school, where he and Ava fell in love, and then eloped to France because Alabama was just not ready for that and Ava doubted that her family was either because even Massachusetts abolitionists were not necessarily in favor of intermarriage.
The romantic appeal of this second option is obvious, but I am not sure “once we get married we are going to hide this aspect of our children’s racial heritage from everyone, but especially your uncle who was so radicalized by D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation that he joined the revitalized Ku Klux Klan,” is an ending that most readers would go for. Hmm.
ANYWAY. Next up is Emilia, a newspaper reporter in the 1950s. I am soooo tempted to intersperse the movie reviews she writes for the paper throughout the book BUT I WILL BE STRONG. Although maybe I should just give in. That would be kind of cool, wouldn’t it? The year is 1953 (Emilia’s beau is - wait for it - a Korean war vet. I have a theme.) and the movies could include Roman Holiday, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker.
Also Calamity Jane and Disney’s Peter Pan. And Stalag 17. This is actually quite a good year in film. And also McCarthyism.
And last but not least we have a college student (grad student?) in the eighties, who is basing her history project on a collection of letters her great grandmother (Ellen White, author of the once popular but now mostly-forgotten Wayfarers series) bequeathed to the university archives. Does our coed fall in love with the junior archivist? Inevitably. Is it too self-referential to have the heroine of a later book studying the correspondence of heroines from earlier books? Maybe.
I want to have her reading Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America” (first published in 1975) which describes the close female friendships of the nineteenth century as “an intriguing and almost alien form of human relationship,” and I want to sort of trace how that happened - how close female friendship went from common to intriguing and almost alien - and also offer a close-to-the-ground view of American history - like Rosemary Sutcliff and British history, except with more women and less death. Insofar as it is possible to do this in a series of romance novels.
You might imagine that this would be distraction enough, BUT IN FACT in resurrecting the book I have also resurrected a series idea, in which each succeeding book would focus on the daughter of the heroine of the book before. The working series title is The Distaff Line, but probably that could be improved upon.
So you have Harriet Peabody, Civil War nurse, and then her niece-by-marriage/adopted daughter Ellen White, writer of a children’s book series called The Wayfarers, who will possibly fall in love at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 (because why wouldn’t you have your heroine fall in love at the World’s Fair if you could) with a geology professor (this part is set in stone for some reason) who is from Germany, or possibly German-occupied Poland, and may or may not be Jewish, I’m still working on these aspects of his identity.
The most important thing is that he needs to have a German last name, because the third book takes place after World War I and the neighbors have been Unpleasant about the family’s connection to Germany. The heroine (as yet unnamed) falls in love with Harriet’s grand-nephew Henri, the grandson of Harriet’s sister Ava and her husband the planter’s son, who was either a white man disowned by his parents because he taught at the freedman’s school where Ava worked and that was just so embarrassing -
Or the mixed-raced son of a French planter in Louisiana (this is the “I have read too much Benjamin January” option) who was sent north for his education and then came south again after the war (in which he fought for the Union and probably got medals and stuff) to teach at a freedman’s school, where he and Ava fell in love, and then eloped to France because Alabama was just not ready for that and Ava doubted that her family was either because even Massachusetts abolitionists were not necessarily in favor of intermarriage.
The romantic appeal of this second option is obvious, but I am not sure “once we get married we are going to hide this aspect of our children’s racial heritage from everyone, but especially your uncle who was so radicalized by D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation that he joined the revitalized Ku Klux Klan,” is an ending that most readers would go for. Hmm.
ANYWAY. Next up is Emilia, a newspaper reporter in the 1950s. I am soooo tempted to intersperse the movie reviews she writes for the paper throughout the book BUT I WILL BE STRONG. Although maybe I should just give in. That would be kind of cool, wouldn’t it? The year is 1953 (Emilia’s beau is - wait for it - a Korean war vet. I have a theme.) and the movies could include Roman Holiday, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker.
Also Calamity Jane and Disney’s Peter Pan. And Stalag 17. This is actually quite a good year in film. And also McCarthyism.
And last but not least we have a college student (grad student?) in the eighties, who is basing her history project on a collection of letters her great grandmother (Ellen White, author of the once popular but now mostly-forgotten Wayfarers series) bequeathed to the university archives. Does our coed fall in love with the junior archivist? Inevitably. Is it too self-referential to have the heroine of a later book studying the correspondence of heroines from earlier books? Maybe.
I want to have her reading Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth Century America” (first published in 1975) which describes the close female friendships of the nineteenth century as “an intriguing and almost alien form of human relationship,” and I want to sort of trace how that happened - how close female friendship went from common to intriguing and almost alien - and also offer a close-to-the-ground view of American history - like Rosemary Sutcliff and British history, except with more women and less death. Insofar as it is possible to do this in a series of romance novels.
