A Fascination with Feminine Fripperies
As we all know, I’ve developed something of an obsession with corsets. My fascination began innocently enough the first time I wrote a love scene featuring a heroine laced into a silk and whalebone gilded cage. As I was choreographing a love scene (author speak for placing hands here, lips there and various other body parts elsewhere) I realized I hadn’t the faintest notion how my hero might divest the lady of her corset.
Writers of Historical Romance are nothing if not expert researchers, and while google is oftentimes my best friend in the world, sometimes only hands on experience will do. So I ordered a corset and enlisted my husband’s assistance lacing me into the convoluted contraption. If you missed my blog post about hooks, laces, sadistic lady’s maids and over-protective husbands, please feel free to read it here.
I liked the first corset so well, I ordered two more, then another and another. If you’ve read my earlier post, you know I discovered that wandering through life wearing a corset can be something of a challenge, not to mention downright dangerous at times.
Still, there is just something exquisitely decadent and luxurious and wonderfully feminine about the frilly, lacy, elegant undergarments from a bygone era. So I ordered a curvaceous wire mannequin to display my growing collection of corsets. Next came the fans and the antique perfume atomizers, the fragile glass vases and bottles, the velvet and satin pillows, the damask drapes and spindly furniture. Before I quite knew how it happened I’d turned my office into a pretty nineteenth century boudoir.
And when I’m lounging on the pillow-strewn daybed, writing, reading, or simply daydreaming, I am inspired by all the feminine fripperies surrounding me. Inspired to write stories of women who would have lived amid such adornments on a daily basis. Women as complicated and contrary as a corset, as fragile and strong as spun glass, as elegant and endearing as silk and velvet and lace.
Women like all of us…writers, readers, and daydreamers.
Speaking of writers, readers and daydreamers, thank you all for the wonderful suggestions of books and authors. My kindle library has grown by leaps and bounds. Now if I could just find time to read them!
Congratulations to Darlene, October’s Corset winner…your Floral Denim Corset is on its way!
And congratulations to LilRed1268, winner of my Halloween Book Hop Giveaway…A signed Copy of Pretty Poison, Two Wine Bottle Corsets and Two Corset Bookmarks will be shipping soon!
I love to hear from my readers so please Subscribe to my Newsletter above if you haven’t already done so, and then simply post a comment below and you’ll be entered to win November’s Vintage Black and White Floral Corset. Share what inspires you, a book recommendation, a bit of news, a notion of any sort, an idiom that’s always struck you as amusing, a regency ideal you’ve found ludicrous, or just a random thought. I’ll draw one winner on December 1st.
November Events Not To Be Missed:
