I had the incredible good fortune to receive a book for review, MY LADY SCANDALOUS, that hit on a subject that appeals to me--courtesans.  Jo Manning is a well-known romance author, but her latest book is something a little different; it's a biography.  Please welcome Jo Manning to Roundtable Reviews. 

It is a pleasure to have you join us for a
few questions.  Can you share with readers more about your new release?

Tracy, I thank you very much for giving me this opportunity to discuss my writing. I am so happy that you enjoyed my book, My Lady Scandalous, my first work of non-fiction and the first full-length biography of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, royal courtesan.

 

When did you know that you wanted to write?  How did you get started?

I used to entertain my little sisters with adventure stories when I was about nine or ten years old. Later, I'd fill up notebooks with ideas and stories but didn't share them with anyone. I always loved reading and thought how great it would be to be a published novelist.

I had a career in librarianship and wrote a lot of articles for professional journals, but about 15 years ago I started submitting my fiction for real -- sending out short stories to magazines and newspapers. I wrote about a half-dozen stories for a feature in The Star called the Love Story Fiction Page. (That was the best thing they did, but unfortunately they no longer have a place for them in that tabloid.) The editor, Barbara De Garmo, was wonderful, and she liked my work. I also had a couple of stories in anthologies -- one of them, "By The Rivers Of Babylon," was based on a woman I met in India; that was in Herotica 4, and the publisher still sends me (tiny but nice!) royalty checks every year -- and then I did an original audiobook based on a specific incident that took place when my family and I were in Kashmir during a tense time, involving guns and soldiers. I called this "The Prairie Princess & The Sanskritologist."  The short story market, though, is not great for popular fiction, and I don't write New Yorker-type literary fiction, so there were few places to send my work. I was advised by a friend to write novels.

Novels! The thought of filling up so many pages with so many words completely paralyzed me. But, I thought I would try, and that's how my first novel, The Sicilian Amulet (which is, hard to believe, almost 90,000 words) was written. The next problem was trying to find a publisher. It wasn't considered a romance because the lovers at one point were separated for too long a time. So I rewrote it. Then I was told that first-person narratives don't sell, so I rewrote it again. It couldn't find a home, so I put it on a computer disc and forgot about it. Later, when my first two Regency romances sold well and received good reviews, the publisher of my second Regency asked what else I had, so I pulled it out, did some minor revision, and it was finally published, 14 years after I'd first written it. 

 

Who do you feel has been most influential in getting your career launched?

Absolutely no doubt about it, my agent, Jenny Bent of Trident Media Group in New York City. I owe my success to her. She's brilliant. I also am blessed to know some wonderful romance authors who've been extremely generous.

 

While your previous releases have been romances, MY LADY SCANDALOUS is a
biography/autobiography.  Did you find it easier to write than fiction or
harder?  Why? 

Apples and oranges. The genres are so different! With fiction, you can make it up as you go along. With non-fiction, you had better have your facts straight. My Lady Scandalous is a heavily research-driven book. I started it in 2001 and finished writing it in 2004; meanwhile, I added hundreds of images in 2004/5, which required picture research, something I'd never done before. It's a whole other kind of skill. That was time-consuming and frustrating.

My editor and I decided, too, to make this a value-added biography. It was aimed for general readers as well as its natural audience of readers of romance and historical fiction, and we thought that adding sidebars that explained the times, the society, the culture, the history, the politics, even the words, was essential to getting the most out of the book. So the narrative of Grace Elliott's incredible life is bolstered with images of her, her family, her lovers, places she lived, fashion plates showing what she wore, etc., and enriched by informative sidebar material that contributes to a fuller understanding of her life in those particular times.

It was very hard work. Not to disparage creative writing -- fiction -- as easy work, not at all, but this involved long stints at microfilm-reading machines in cold, ill-lit libraries (you guessed it! I was in England), reading and consulting a very large number of reference and other books, trying to decipher handwritten documents like wills and letters, spending a good deal of time sitting at the computer doing Internet searching trying to track down obscure people, traveling to far-off places (that wasn't so bad :-), interviewing some great people and trying to interview some who were unfortunately uncooperative. It was fun to have lunch with the lovely British actress Lucy Russell, who portrayed Grace Elliott in the film that started it all, The Lady and the Duke (it was when I saw the review that I became fascinated with Grace) and to meet the 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley, whose ancestor, the lst Marquess, had been Grace's longtime lover, at his stately home in Norfolk.

 

In all honesty, my first real knowledge of courtesans came from the movie,
Moulin Rouge.  Do you think the movie captured their lifestyle
realistically? 

French actress/performer-courtesans, a lively group! The courtesan was so much an accepted part of the French lifestyle. No one blinked an eye. They were decorative and they served a purpose. The English tended to be hypocritical. Men could use the services of courtesans (and, remember, courtesans were not streetwalkers, not common prostitutes, but at the higher end of the sex trade) and be received in polite society -- the bon ton -- while the women who serviced them could not be in the same room with respectable women and the wives of these men. Grace Elliott had a better time of it in France than she did in England; she much preferred living there, in a more sophisticated, worldly society. Queen Charlotte -- King George III's wife -- would never have received her, but in France, before the Revolution, Queen Marie-Antoinette would speak to Grace in a friendly manner and dandle Grace's child (said to have been the result of a liaison with the Prince of Wales) on her royal lap.

Here was the secret to being a successful courtesan -- and it was a business, mind you, where love rarely had anything to do with it -- you negotiated contracts with your keepers. The English courtesans who understood this received annuities that lasted far beyond the temporal relationship. They were for life, payable in quarters, and the deeds to property were -- if they were smart -- in their names, too. One had to be smart to survive and to save for a comfortable old age. The ones who did not understand this came to extremely sad ends. 

 

Do you find it easier to create your characters or the plot? 

No contest! Characters, always characters. Plotting is hard. I envy those whose plots spring full-blown out of their heads. 

 

If you could invite three authors (past or present) to dinner, who would you
choose and why? 

Wow! What a great question...and so hard to answer. There are some authors whose work I love but whose personalities would completely repel me, so that's a problem.  I love D.H. Lawrence, for instance, but he might make me nervous. Ditto James Joyce. Charles Dickens might be fun, though. He'd certainly have a lot of entertaining stories. 

It would be easy, though, to choose living romance writers:  I'd pick Edith Layton, Mary Jo Putney, and Mary Balogh. Three very bright, very charming, very knowledgeable women whose company I thoroughly enjoy and who have been so supportive. (I should add Barbara Metzger, too, but that makes 4... )

For living, non-romance authors, I'd choose:  Connie Willis, a writer usually categorized as science fiction, but, man, she is so much more, as witness her classic The Doomsday Book; Salley Vickers (her Miss Garnet's Angel is a marvelous, poignant book); and Tracy Chevalier, author of Girl With A Pearl Earring and The Virgin Blue, who only gets better and better. Again, they are smart, and their stories are inventive and evocative.

Oh, dear, see what you've started? For past romance/historical fiction authors:  Daphne DuMaurier, Jane Austen, Anya Seton... I had better stop! I love cooking and throwing dinner parties and I love clever authors... 

 

What are you working on next?

I was deep into research on another biography of an 18th century woman maligned by her times, but had to shift gears when I found out someone in England had not only chosen the same subject but already signed a contract. It really ticked me off, because I thought I had a unique angle on this lady. Well, let this other author do it and then after it comes out I will perhaps revisit my idea. It's not unusual to have two books on the same topic appear. In fact, three bios of Mary Robinson (Prinny's first mistress aka Perdita) have come out in the past 18 months, and they've all sold fairly well. Meanwhile, have had three Regency ideas -- but the market for Regencies seems to have dried up, alas, despite their great popularity with readers -- what are those publishers thinking?! -- and I have an idea for another biography that is exciting me right now. (But I can't say who it is because I want to keep it all to myself until I get a contract signed -- I don't want to jinx it!) I'm going to stick with this new biography idea. Again, no full-length biographies have ever been done, so the field is wide open.