Redeeming the Redeemed Rake Trope: Erin Satie's THE YOUNG BLOOD

The trope of the redeemed rake is a staple of historical romance. But the rake of romance is very rarely a rake in the sense that people of the past meant the word: "a fashionable or stylish man of dissolute or promiscuous habits." Or at least, the emphasis tends to be far more on the "promiscuous" side of things, than on the "dissolute." A rakish romance hero is one who is sexually experienced (a good quality in the eyes of romance readers), rather one who is characterized by the negative qualities of licentiousness, profligacy, or debauchery. Admiration for a "young blood," another name for the rake, rarely takes into consideration the blood (metaphorical and actual) such a man is likely to leave in his wake.

The original 18th century rake:
Hogarth's The Rake's Progress (painting 3)

Which is why I'm always excited when I come across the one or two historical romances published each year that feature rakes who are rakish in both senses of the word: lauded for their sexual exploits and disdained for the lack of morals which has engendered them. And Alfred Lamb, Earl of Kingston, the male lead in the fourth book in Erin Satie's Victorian romance series, No Better Angels, is most definitely a romance rake of the more uncommon type.

Readers of Satie's earlier books have met Kingston in the guise of antagonist, and so will be well aware that the hero of The Young Blood is not heroic in any real sense of the word. But for those for whom this is a first Satie read, the author makes it clear from the book's opening lines that here is a man who is about as uninterested in living the life exemplary as it is possible to be: "He hadn't bothered with the fancy dress. For a long time—most of his life, really—Alfred Lamb, Earl of Kingston, had done the absolute minimum necessary to get by. More and more often, even that was beyond him" (Kindle Loc 36).

"Getting by" for Alfie consists largely of charming different women into bed—or onto a couch, or down to the floor—drowning the griefs of his youth in physical pleasure. He has a way with the ladies, a bad habit, as even he himself has come to see it. A way of slipping past their defenses, of seeing what it is they truly desire, then giving it to them—or at least, some semblance of it: "Show her an idealized version of herself, give her a magic mirror that reflected just the right amount of truth, and she would treat the painter as an oracle. She would want more; she would reveal herself, make herself vulnerable, to have it" (299). Alfie knows his behavior is selfish, but at least he is no longer suffocating on his own despair.

Alfie, too, lets women see just enough of himself to entice them—but without making himself the least bit vulnerable:

"Lord Kingston," she murmured, all wonder and sympathy. "I believe you've been hurt."
     "Is it so obvious?" Alfie felt his lips twist. He knew the answer to this question: yes. An alarming number of women scented it on him.
     What's more, it only whetted their appetites. They seemed to enjoy the fantasy of a rake driven by heartbreak. As though he were one shard short of being whole again and thought the missing piece must be hiding under a lady's skirt.
     He gathered that many women hoped his loyalties would transfer to a new target midcoitus. And then, broken heart healed, the fullness of love would drive him with the same intensity as the lack of it had. He'd be a perfect mate.
     These women were impressed by the dogged persistence of his decade-long pursuit. It ought to worry them. Any method that failed so consistently ought to be abandoned, or at least revised.
     But really, they ought to have asked themselves a completely different question: where had the object of his affections disappeared to? What did she know that they didn't? Because if she had gone, never to return, it wasn't because he was so damned loving.
     He had never been anyone's knight in shining armor.... The misunderstanding was staggering, really. (558)

To show any of the women he lies with anything beyond the mere air of vulnerability would be to defeat the purpose of the game: to drown the sorrows of his many painful losses in sensual pleasure.

Alfie thinks because he warns women about his true colors, tells them that they shouldn't sleep with him, that it is their fault, not his, if they do not heed his warnings:

     "I should never have—"
     "Which I told he last night," he interrupted. "Several times."
     She gaped at him, the blood slowly draining out of her face. It never helped to warn them. (839)

It takes a curious bystander, one as brusque as Alfie is charming, to hold up a magic mirror to him, one that begins to show him not an idealized version of himself, but rather the havoc his own behavior is causing in the lives of others:

     "Because it was your fault."
     "It was?"
     "I saw you talking to her at the Finlay-Coateses', before I left."
     "And?"
     "If there is any truth to these rumors, then you've caused her great harm. Altered her life for the worse—perhaps ruined it entirely."
     "Helen Fairbanks is free to make her own choices. Good or ill."
     "That doesn't follow at all, Lord Kingston," said Sabine. "She might have chosen to spend one evening with you; that doesn't make her free." (1196)

Sabine Banchory, the daughter of a duke, has been unhappily married for years. But intelligent, dignified Sabine holds tight to self-respect, something that Alfie has never been able to grasp, and does not deign to show her unhappiness in public. It is in nature to reserve all the hardest tasks to herself; she believes that "work, persistent and unstinting effort applied over time, was the secret to a life well-lived and the only route to greatness" (756). And if it is work to put up with her gambling, philandering husband, well, that is what she will do. And she will not hesitate to chastise a man whose selfishness causes harm to others. Even when that man has set his sights on seducing her.

Sabine's magic mirror may start Alfie thinking, but it a lot more to shock him out of his self-absorption. A horrific act of violence. A debt incurred, a repayment necessitated. And the slow, drawn-out tension of a seduction unsatisfied, taut with desire.

I've been a fan of Satie's gorgeous writing style from the start of her career. But with this final book in her inaugural series, she proves that she is as capable of crafting a compelling storyline replete with sexual tension as she is of penning gorgeous prose. The Young Blood could well be the best historical romance you'll read all year.

Illustration credits:
Hogarth: Wikipedia
Magic mirror: Bon Appetit Hon

Erin Satie

The Young Blood

Little Phrase, 2016

Early Edith Layton and Male-Inflected Romance

Last month, on the Heroes and Heartbreakers blog, Darlene Marshall wrote a column for lovers of Mary Balogh's historical romances, with recommendations of authors to read "after you've read every Mary Balogh." I'd already read all of Joanna Bourne's books, and most of Jo Beverly's, but I'd only read one by the third author Marshall recommended, Edith Layton. Marshall's description of Layton's The Duke's Wager ("a classic modern Regency which strays beyond the conventions, giving us a questionable hero whose true self is only revealed in small glimpses as the story unfolds")—intrigued me. And so began a month of Layton indulgence.

After reading the first six Signet romances Layton published—The Duke's Wager (1983), The Disdainful Marquis (1983), The Mysterious Heir (1984), Red Jack's Daughter (1984), Lord of Dishonor (1984) and The Abandoned Bride (1985)—I've come to admire Layton's prose style, in particular her skillful use of point of view. Especially in openings of her novels, she often uses a distant narrative point of view to convey the sense of aristocrats being looked upon by the wider world, and being judged by that world:

But when the magnificent carriage bearing the insignia of St. John Basil St. Charles, Marquis of Bessacarr drew up to the curb and a large gentleman alighted, sweeping his impassive stare over them, even the hungriest among them did not press any further forward. Here was a knowing one, they thought, and a hard one, who would not need to dazzle his ladybird with careless largess to strangers. (Kindle Loc 64)

But once her story begins she pulls closer, allowing us inside the heads of her characters.

In spite of the fact that she uses multiple points of view, allowing us access to both her heroes and her heroines' minds, though, I must confess I found her heroes far more interesting, and far more psychologically complex, than the heroines with which they are paired. Layton's heroines may "stray beyond the conventions" of Regency society, but they always do so in plot, not in character. And when they stray, they do so by accident, not by design. For example, Regina of The Duke's Wager mistakenly attends the opera on a night meant only for the demimonde, thus drawing the attention of not just one, but two men who wish to "protect" her, while Catherine of The Disdainful Marquis takes a job as a lady's companion only to discover that her employer "expected her hired companions not to please her, but to please the gentlemen she adored having swarm around her." At heart, though, each young woman is conventional in the Signet Regency way: a virtuous, sexually innocent, good young lady.

Layton's men, though—well, to me at least, they were drawn with far more variety. The Duke's Wager features two rakes, rakes who actually are rakes, one quite openly, the other more in secret:

It was well known that St. John was in the petticoat line, that his doings among these graceless females exceeded that which could be called normal in a man of his position.... There were tales of mistresses, and wild parties and license. But his behavior in the drawing room was impeccable, even if his behavior in other rooms was wide open to speculation. (Kindle Loc 471)

But their reasons for their rakish behavior, as well as their methods for accomplishing their rakish goals, are dramatically different. And because Layton allows us inside both of their heads, as well as inside the head of the current object of their mutual pursuit, readers never know for sure which man will end up winning fair Regina's regard. And readers get to make their own judgments, along with Regina, about the behavior of both men. The best part was that readers get to see how and why one man reforms (at least in part), and why the other does not.

Lord of Dishonor's Christian, Viscount North is a also a rake, but for entirely different reasons than are the gentlemen in Wager. But he, as well as the heroes of the three other books I read, who are more in the upstanding rather than the rakish line, each come across as far more experienced, and thus far more skilled in navigating the social and romantic world, than do their female counterparts. Quite often while reading, I felt as if I were being invited to laugh at the heroines and the mistakes they make because of their inexperience, because I, like the heroes, knew far more about life and love than did the young ladies. And thus that I was being asked to identify more with the heroes than with the heroines.

I'm looking forward to reading further into Layton's Signet oeuvre, to see if her heroes continue to outshine her heroines, and in what ways. In the meantime, though, I'm wondering—are there any readers who prefer romances in which one side of the romantic partnership shines brighter than the other? Or is our current trend toward dual point of view romances make such preferences unlikely?

Male Friends and Romance Heroes

My adolescent daughter seems to spend far more time hanging out in mixed gender friend groups than I did when I was her age. I've been wondering if that's true of my favorite authors of New Adult romance, too, and if so, thinking about what effect such a change in everyday adolescent social relationships might be having on the depiction of romance heroes in their books.

For an earlier generation of romance writers (say, the women who contributed to Jayne Ann Krentz's 1992 essay collection Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women: Romance Writers on the Appeal of the Romance), relationships between men and women in romance were/are, by the very nature of the genre, adversarial. The central story of romance is the conquest of the alpha male hero by the moral, virginal, emotionally-adept heroine. In Krentz's words, "Romance novels are tales of brave women taming dangerous men" (113). Or, in Doreen Owens Malek's: "So what is the fantasy? Simply this: a strong dominant, aggressive male brought to the point of surrender by a woman" (74). Or in Daphne Clair's: "The thrill is in the contest and the chase, in the complicated advance-and-retreat by which the strong-minded heroine, while appearing to be hunted and ill-used, finally turns the tables on and lovingly entraps the hunter" (67). Even Susan Elizabeth Phillips, who asserts at the start of her essay that she is an "outspoken feminist," echoes Krentz's belief in the characteristics of the romance hero: "He is the mightiest of the mighty, the strongest of the strong. But because he has been tamed by our heroine, because she exerts such a powerful emotional stranglehold over him, his almost superhuman physical strength is now hers to command" (58). For the romance writers in Krentz's collection, men are dangerous, scary, and above all powerful; it is the romance heroine's task to use emotion (i.e., love) to "tame" that power and use it to her own ends. Female empowerment comes from subjugating the male, overcoming her own limitations because, as Phillips asserts, "his strength now belongs to her" (58).

Do women who hang out in co-ed friendship groups fantasize about this type of heroic masculinity? I'm guessing probably not, or at least not as often. My daughter doesn't value her male friends because she can tame them and thereby borrow their power; she values them because they encourage her and support her as she works to discover the ways in which she herself can exercise power in the world around her. After experiencing supportive, rather than antagonist, friend relationships with boys, would a young woman truly wish for a romantic partner who is more "dangerous beast" (in Krentz's formulation) than encouraging partner? Or to read about one in a romance novel?

Would love to hear from romance writers about if/how their friendships with boys/men when they were teens have influenced their vision of what makes for a perfect male romance hero.

The Protective Hero, or What Are Romance Readers So Afraid Of?

I've heard a lot of romance writers and critics account for the trend in romance for BDSM heroines, and romance heroines in general, taking sexual pleasure by giving up control by pointing to the burdens of the second shift. Having won a certain degree of equality in the workplace (we'll put aside the issue of the gendered wage gap for now), the majority of Western women now put in a full day of work outside the home. But since men have not rallied for equality on the home front, at least not to the same degree that women have on the work front, women end up pulling a second shift, still doing nearly the same amount of childcare and housework that they did when they worked only at home: cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, scheduling children's medical appointments, sending birthday cards to relatives, etc. etc. The apparently sexist romance trope of giving over power/control, then, is really a metaphoric cry of feminist frustration/outrage at continued gender inequalities in a purportedly post-feminist society.

I can buy this explanation to a certain extent (although the snarky, outspoken side of me just wants to stop and shout, "don't just wallow in a book that tries to distract you from the inequality in your life; demand that your boyfriend/spouse take on an equitable share of the home chores!"). What I'm thinking about today, though, is the fact that I haven't yet heard a comparable socio-historic explanation for the prevalence of another, perhaps even more common trope in romance: the trope of the protective hero. Mr. Protector is the star of the majority of today's paranormal books, especially those with shapeshifters. But he also appears almost as often in erotica, in romantic suspenses, in historicals, and even in contemporaries. In fact, I came across him twice just in the past three days, and not just in books from the same publisher, or by the same author, or even in the same genre: in Virna DePaul's rather un-feminist* erotic suspense romance Filthy Rich, as well as in Meredith Duran's far more progressive Victorian historical, Luck Be a Lady. To wit:

"Despite the fact that she was obviously capable of taking care of herself, she brought out his protective instincts" (Filthy Rich, Kindle Loc 525)

"I'm going to protect you on this, Cara. Trust me, okay?" (FR 1821)

"He'd fucking promised to protect Cara, and instead he'd allowed someone to get close while they'd ben dancing and endanger her again" (FR 3895)

"I told you once: violence is clumsy. But sometimes it's called for. And when me and mind are at stake, I'll do what I must. Show no weakness, accept no insult, allow no advantage: that's the law of the street. (Luck p. 216)

     "Your wife, whom you will overrule whenever you deem it fit. Your wife, whom you will lock away when her desires strike you as inconvenient."
     "To hell with that," he snarled. "If I think you in danger, yes. That's what a man does—for his wife, for his friends, for anyone he loves. You think I give a damn if you're angry now, so long as you're safe tonight?" (Luck 327)


The word "protect," or some form of it, appears forty times in the NetGalley ARC of Filthy Rich, most often in reference to the feelings that its rich businessman hero, Branden Duke, experiences towards the heroine Cara. In contrast, the word appears hardly at all in the novel by the more literarily-inclined Duran. Yet Duran's hero, a London crime boss, is just as invested in a conception of masculinity defined by its ability to protect a heterosexual beloved as is DePaul's Manhattanite financier.

Why, at this particular point in history, do so many romance readers find the fantasy of being loved by a protective man so appealing? Or, to ask the question another way, what are romance readers today so afraid of? In real life, few of us are in danger of having someone ruin our reputations with a false sex tape, or being abducted by a mad Russian general, or being attacked by a crazed colleague, or being incarcerated in a Victorian madhouse. What is is that many romance readers feel in danger of, then, that draws them/us like bees to pollen to heroes who promise to save us, even at the expense of our independence?



*See my Goodreads review of Filthy Rich if you want the particulars of why I consider this one unfeminist

The Gender-Bending Appeal of the Cross-dressing Hero, part 1: Anna Cowan's UNTAMED

Cross-dressing heroines have long been a staple of historical romance fiction. Donning men's breeches not only allows heroines of the past to ride a horse astride, but to take on identities and infiltrate spaces coded as "for men only." A woman masquerading as a man suggests a rebellious spirit, a willingness to buck social norms, a desire to capture and wield the power culturally normed as "masculine." Though her peers may find her costuming scandalous, the cross-dressing heroine of romance fiction more often finds approval from readers raised to take the equality of women for granted.

What, though, of the cross-dressing male? If a woman donning breeches signals strength and power, what cultural assumptions do we make when a man pulls a dress over his head? As Mindy Hung notes, when it's obvious that the body beneath the petticoats is a male body—broad shoulders, hairy chest, square jaw—the effect is one of emphasizing masculinity rather than adopting femininity; see, even if I try to be a lady, my manliness still shines clearly through.

Jack Lemmon finds high heels a bit difficult to navigate...

With the exception of a burgeoning list of m/m romances featuring heroes in drag, most male cross-dressing heroes are played for laughs—think of Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis struggling to manage their high heels as the walk down the train platform in 1959's Some Like it Hot, or Robin Williams in 1993's Mrs. Doubtfire standing at the toilet, peeing from beneath his skirt. Men may don dresses if for some reason they've been stripped of their male power (Jack & Tony hiding from the mob, Daniel Hilliard/Mrs. Doubtfire because his wife has denied him access to his children), but once order has been restored, power returned to its rightful place, heterosexual men typically revert to more gender-conforming garb.

Can a straight woman find a cross-dressed hero sexually attractive? Worthy of love? Two recent romances challenge readers to embrace heroes who perform non-conforming gender not only to hide or to regain power, but because they enjoy the sheer pleasure of taking on a feminine persona.

The traditional cover of Anna Cowan's regency historical, Untamed, published this past May, gives little hint of the gender-bending story inside. Eager to break up the affair between her newly married sister and the rakish Duke of Darlington, Katherine (Kit) Sutherland rashly agrees to the duke's unusual bargain: he'll leave London, and abandon her sister, the Countess of BenRuin—but only if Kit allows him to tag along with her to Sutherland family manor in the country. Kit believes she's got the best of the bargain; more comfortable in her role as axe-wielding pig farmer than society darling (she describes herself as "the dark hobgobling sister. Although perhaps too tall and strong for a hobgoblin. Perhaps the child of a hobgoblin and a tree"), Kit is only too happy to abandon the city, a world to which "she would never be made to fit" (Loc 75).

That is, until she discovers Darlington plans to spend his time in the country dressed as a woman, so h/she can share unchaperoned time—and a bedroom—with Kit. Unfortunately for our heroine, the duke's female "cousin" is not played for laughs. Lady Rose makes for just as compelling a woman as s/he does a man:

Even after nine hours she could not stop staring.
     Across the table, taking tea, was the most magnificent woman Kit had ever seen. She wore the rigid dress of the previous generation, but instead of looking outdated she made you long for the gorgeous, riotous colours of another age. Yellow poppies burst across the wine-red silk that bound her torso, chest and shoulders. They trailed down the skirts that waterfalled under their modest table. She was tightly corseted, her trim figure accentuated by the flare of small hoops beneath her skirts. She looked out the window, offering Kit her profile—the fine, straight nose, the smiling, expressive lips and heavy eyes. She wore a black wig, one thick coil falling over her shoulder on to the white linen tucked around her neck. (800)

Dramatic enough for Jude?

Kit isn't the only one who finds Lady Rose attractive. Kit's less-than-assertive younger brother is relieved to find himself finally attracted to a woman, while Kit's don't-look-too-closely-at-what-you'd-rather-not-see mother is only too glad to have a London gossip of Lady Rose's caliber sharing her parlour. The local squire toadies to the noblewoman, while his daughter schemes to snare her high-ranking male cousin. No one is meant to laugh at Darlington's performance, not even the reader; we're meant to find it as magnetic, as energizing, as is everyone who is drawn into his circle. "If Byron was magnificent, Jude was cataclysmic," muses Kit, an opinion we are meant to share (4235).

Jude, the Duke of Darlington, finds himself drawn to Kit in large part because of her strength: she's survived the physical abuse of a father, acts as financial head of her family, and wields a mighty axe to boot. Darlington, too, has been the victim of abuse—"You may not have noticed this... but I'm not exactly the manly variety of man. My father was a keen observer of the fact, and his response was to lock me into a particular room under the house with no windows" (1087)—but finds himself as a result not a tower of strength, but a mass of suicidal fear, compelled to inflict pain and humiliation on others to ensure they keep a safe distance. Instinctually, he feels that the sharp-tongued masculine Kit can save him from worst self. But Kit turns the tables, urging him to embrace everything that makes him himself, arrogance, insults, and all.

Cowan does not just create a simple inversion of gender roles (although Kit does make for an arresting cross-dressed man, when she returns to London to pursue the fleeing Jude and publicly stake her claim to him). The masculine but passionate Kit doesn't do all the rescuing; the feminine but arrogant Jude isn't the only one to feel fear:

He had been so closed when he first came, she thought, and then frowned.
     She had not wanted to be moved by him. She held herself tightly, and understood for the first time why he did that.
     She had been so closed when he first came. (3605)

When the two finally become physically intimate (after weeks of tense longing), there is no sense that Darlington must first shed his womanly garments, that he must shake free of the feminine aspects of his mannerisms and appearance, in order to be a sexually-appealing partner to Kit. In fact, his appeal seems to lie largely in femininity performed by a male body:

She untied the bow of his laces and began to loosen them with practiced tugs. His hands gripped the seat against the movement, and she wondered whether he felt, as she did, that she was breaking into something tender and unseen.
     She lifted the bodice away from his body and pulled the chemise roughly down around his hips.
     Then she knelt behind him, and traced the red lines pressed into his skin by the bodice and the material trapped beneath it.
     She opened her hands against him, so that the whole surface of her palms and fingers could take in the sensation of his skin, finer and warmer than silk. The slim curve of his waist. His ribs. She leaned closer, helpless, her mouth open an inch from him. She felt how he shivered beneath her hands, how pleasure built between them and made him lower his head until his neck was a vulnerable curve that she had to capture in her palm.
     Was it possible to die of pleasure just from this? (3694)

Heyer's not-quite-so-gender-bending
romance, starring siblings
Prudence/Peter
and Robin/Kate

The novel's climax suggests that through loving each other, both Jude and Kit will come into their own distinct types of power—wily Jude as a politician, master of manipulation; Kit in the more directly forceful role of future captain of industry. And they will continue to clash and quarrel, as they wrestle with one another for power, neither afraid his or her own strength will diminish the other. As Kit's sister Lydia reminds Kit in the novel's epilogue, "Darling, it would be impossible to be married to him and not fight. He'll never give up trying to get the upper hand, and you'll never let him. There's no way to do that peacefully. Besides, is peace really what you want?" (5452)

Cowan's debut novel often runs aground on the shoals of its ambition; the opening London section, in particular, reveals an author not quite in control of her material, doling out hints of myriad secrets in so opaque a manner that confusion rather than enticement is all that's likely to result. Yet I'm a reader who enjoys an ambitiously flawed novel as well as (often more than) a flawlessly executed iteration of the same conventional story. And when a flawed novel demonstrates how nonconforming gender identities can result, at least in part, from childhood trauma but simultaneously refuses to assert that such identities are in need of being "fixed" or "healed," even by love, it's definitely a work that I'll be placing on my "keeper" shelf.


Come back next Tuesday for Gender-Bending part 2: Thoughts on L. H. Cosway's contemporary romance, Painted Faces



Photo credits:
Some Like it Hot: YouTube
18th Century Dress: Chani et Binou
Masqueraders cover: Wikipedia

Anna Cowan, Untamed

Destiny/Penguin Australia, 2013.