Thread: Regency England

Please Cat go and do some more research before you carry on with this novel, you may well have the most brilliant idea but you aren't going to be able to do it justice until you are completely familiar with the period you have decided to set it in and I'm afraid it's glaringly obvious that you don't know much about the period You're a journalist so you must know how to research and get your facts right, look up the British Library and find their website, get some books and biographies out of the library and read, read, read that way you won't mix up the Elizabethen period with the Regency ( some 250 years between them) and you'll be able to flavour your book with a real sense of the times.

Why would you make a bunch of assumptions that I am not doing reseach? I'm on my second draft and have read up a lot and am being very picky about which time period each type of detail would have occured/taken place. Do you not trust people who are Journalists? Are you making an assumption based on the media?

Because you didn't realise that the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 not 1818, because you suggested a book about daily life in Elizabethan England as a resource for life in the Regency period (rather like suggesting someone researches Abigail Adams as background for the life of a president's wife when writing about Jackie Kennedy) etc... It's one thing not knowing about a specifc point, like the original poster's question, it's quite different not knowing the basic facts about your period and the date of the major war during that period is a basic fact. You also said in an earlier post you weren't being "picky" about details - when writing a historical novel you have to be, even more than when wriiting a contemporary novel, because you'll get caught out by your readers. Established bestselling authors can get away with being slapdash, new ones can't, their publishers don't like it when they get letters of complaint about details.

I can't think why you believe I don't trust journalists - I said you are a journalist so you must know how to do research, it's part of your job. I was merely stating a fact, research will probably come easier to you than for someone who has never tried researching anything, that's all.

Many apologies if I've offended you, it wasn't meant, but as the granddaughter of a passionate historian (whose books are still used as texts in some US universities) and the writer of historical novels myself I do take historical accuracy seriously, after all nothing destroys the world of a novel quicker than discovering that the writer has made a fundamental error.

Forget I ever put up this thread, I was barely starting to fact check when I put it up. Can anyone tell me how to remove myself from this site? I've been repeatedly attacked no matter where I post anything.