Category: Uncategorized


Feb
2025

Top 12 Posts of 2012

categories: A Day in the Life, Announcements, Author Interview, Book Reviews, Uncategorized

Here at Regency Reflections, we have a dynamic team that works hard to provide our followers great insight and heart about all things regency.

Below are our top 12 posts for 2012. Take a moment and enjoy. We look forward to bringing you more great content in 2013.

Real Life Romance–And How to Keep it Alive 1
My Carriage Awaits… Maybe 2
A Review of “Jane Austen Knits” 3
A Flight of Fancy: a Regency Novel by Laurie Alice Eakes 4
Mr. Darcy, An Alpha Male in Love 5
Mourning in the Regency Period 6
What Happened to the Traditional Regency? 7
Interview and a Give-A-Way with Author Jamie Carie 8
Get to Know Our Own Laurie Alice Eakes (And win that gift basket!) 9
How to Have an American Duke 10
“Passion for Regency Fashion – The Pelisse” Susan Karsten 11
Wedding Hotspots in Regency England 12

Originally posted 2013-01-07 10:00:00.

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Feb
2025

OMG! Seen On TV! Queen of Exiles on The View

categories: Uncategorized
Sunny Hostin holding up a copy of Queen of Exiles!!!

This is so exciting. Queen of Exiles is a Sunny Lit Pick!!! On August 2nd, she introduced Queen of Exiles to The View.

Meet Queen Louise. This is a historical fiction about a true queen, Hayti’s 1st and only queen. It’s a sweep tale which will take you through the politics and intrigues of the Haitian Court to the twists and turns of Regency and Victorian England and France and Italy. Queen Louise was a brave woman who dared to be Black, royal, and happy.

Learn More

Queen of Exiles is a good book to read.

It’s a good book to listen to.

The audiobook performed by Robin Miles won an Earphone Award from Audiofile Magazine. It’s an Editor’s Choice Selection for the Historical Novel Society.

Riley’s historical novel feels timely and relevant, commemorating a time when Black women were queens. – Jodi Picoult, #1 New York Times bestselling author

Originally posted 2023-08-09 04:02:11.

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Feb
2025

A Remarkably Regency Yuletide

categories: Uncategorized
Regency House Christmas by Linore Rose Burkard(Adapted from, Regency House Christmas: The Definitive Guide to a Remarkably Regency Yuletide by Linore Rose Burkard)
Much has been made, said, written about and portrayed regarding an English Victorian Christmas, with hardly any good references to Regency Yuletides. Did England keep Christmas during the Regency? If so, how was it observed? Certainly not with ceiling-high Christmas trees (I cringe whenever I see a Regency set during the Christmas season with   big, modern tree on the cover. It just wasn’t the custom.)


But if the Victorian Christmas we are all familiar with wasn’t the mode during the regency, then what happened? How did things change?


Thanks to the Industrial Revolution and advances in the power of the press (ie., photos, color printing, and both as applied to advertisements) the Victorian era was portrayed
in mass media as no time before it ever had been. After a picture of Prince Albert’s Christmas tree appeared in the London paper in 1848, England saw an immediate adoption of the Germanic practice (of putting up big trees), including a whole new way of “keeping” Christmas on a larger scale than virtually anyone had ever done before.


In short, the holiday became fashionable.


An abundance of colored holiday prints survive to this day, which is proof for the pudding, so to speak. The Regency, however, suffers from a lack of pictorial records regarding the Season. This is not (in my opinion) due to a lack of spiritual observance, as has been often assumed. The reason there are so many happy depictions of Victorian Christmas life, is because there are so many depictions of Victorian life, period.


The process of printing in color became easier, thereby becoming cheaper, and thus spawning a great deal of inexpensive prints and artwork, much of which we still have. The middle class came into its own in the Victorian era, and with it, its spending power. Merchandising, while not near the level of what it is today, nevertheless “discovered” that it could cater to the tastes of this large segment of society, and make a tidy profit while doing so.


A Victorian Christmas TreeThe Christmas card, (the first of which was not printed until 1843- and even then, was not in color) became affordable with the introduction of the penny post–cheap mail. So this catapulted the onslaught of a huge mass of printed Christmas scenes which we still see today.


In other ways, the growing prosperity of a large middle class made Christmas in the more modern sense affordable to more people, and this played into how it appeared in printed literature, magazines, newspapers, and the like.


The Victorians did not invent Christmas gaieties, however, but instead merely added to ages-old traditions, many of which were richly observed even during the quieter, less commercialized yuletides of the Regency.


To some, the Regency and Christmas seem to have nothing in common. The rug of stability had been pulled from beneath the population. The King, symbol of power for the nation, was believed to have gone mad. Very unsettling. In his place, a pleasure- loving, hedonistic, but immensely dignified prince became regent. Despite a great deal of criticism leveled against him, he was nonetheless the figurehead of society; he set the tone for the ton (pardon the pun), who in turn, influenced their tenants and servants. In some degree, there was a general feeling of the nation collectively holding its breath-the King was fit for bedlam and the country was at war–and waiting. And when the Regent lived as if nothing else mattered but the elegance of his rooms and the quality of his food, and the pleasure of the moment-the country followed suit.


All of the above plays into the absence of attention to Christmas during the era. We can say, in fact, that it was commercially neglected, though not, as we shall see, socially forgotten. Looking back, it is easy to assume the holiday had no significance, but our hindsight is informed by the contrast of quieter observances than what the Victorians made commonplace.


Christmas Greetings, A Decorated BellThe Regency never knew the lavish Christmases of the late 1800s, the Victorian ideal. England had still not fully recovered from the former ban on all things Christmas made
in the 16th century as a response to subversion. The fact that they celebrated as we shall see they did, is in fact evidence of a great desire to keep the holiday.


It was kept on a quieter scale, with a table-top tree, if any, but it was assuredly anticipated with excitement, kept with reverence and gaities, and looked back upon with affection.


For more information regarding a regency Yuletide, including games, food, the church calendar, hymns, poems, and more, see my recent blog post about my ebook, Regency House Christmas: A Remarkably Regency Yuletide!


Warmest Blessings for a Merry Christmas to you!


Originally posted 2012-12-19 10:00:00.


Feb
2025

Holiday Traditions: From Regency England to Present Day

categories: Christmas, Christmas, Food, History, Holiday, Holiday cooking, Uncategorized

I smile as I type this post today, because it is with great fondness that I look back on some of my childhood memories.

When I was six or seven and we gathered around the table on Christmas Eve to eat lamb and fruitcake and Yorkshire pudding, I hardly realized one day I’d be writing books set near the Regency Period of British history. So there I was, a young child scrunching up my nose at the funny shaped golden blobs that didn’t resemble pudding at all but were called pudding, grumbling that the lamb tasted funny, and complaining that thew fruitcake didn’t look much like cake. But my English grandmother beamed throughout the entire meal, telling us how she used to eat these foods every Christmas when she was growing up.

During Regency days, goose, venison and beef would have been the prevalent meat at Christmas feasts, not lamb. Yorkshire pudding was a common food for the lower classes, and wouldn’t have been served in aristocratic households. But these food were around (along with other familiar Christmas foods like eggnog and gingerbread) and somehow they filtered across the Atlantic with my great grandparents and down through the years onto our dining room table when I was younger. The thought makes me want to whip up a batch of Yorkshire pudding and introduce it to my family this year.

So now I’m curious about you and your holiday traditions. Last week Kristi posted on Christmas carols that we still sing today, and Laurie Alice posted recipes for chocolate drops, confectionery drops, and white soup that many of us probably still enjoy come the holiday season.

What Regency traditions do you and your families take part in come Christmas time?

Originally posted 2012-12-10 10:00:26.