Need help with late 1700's/early 1800's research

A good place to start would be Women's Life and Work in the Southern Colonies, by Julia Cherry Spruill. Since the focus is colonial days, it's a tad early for your time period, but some of her source material is as late as the 1780s-1790s. Great book.

If you can get a hold of them, I highly recommend reading newspapers from the era. Some university libraries have great collections on microfilm.

The crux of well written historical fiction is in the research. You are asking for, in one post, what took me a year's worth of solid research (and then continued research while writing) to discover.

If you truly want to write credible, engaging historical fiction, my advice to you would be to start reading - books , websites, personal narratives, newspapers, diaries - comb the bibliography of one book in order to find five other books you need to read. Find the music from your time period and listen to it. Look at the art created during your time period. Visit historical sites and museums.

In my experience, getting my head properly into a specific time period in order to develop story/characters that resonant and compell the reader to turn the page is crucial. There is no easy way around it.

Your first step should be a visit to your library.

Sigh!

Please do look in the Resources sticky at the top of this board. There's everything you need to know there.

Do try reading the actual letters and diaries written at the time. The website url is in the stickies but here it is again.
http://www.pikle.demon.co.uk/diaryjunction/htm

Don't rush this. You need the mind set, the understanding that Religion was your hope and lifeline, that you depended on your family for food and shelter.
A woman was the weaker vessel who must obey the Bible and St Paul and be obedient to her husband. She had no rights, no money, everything was her husband's. Woman's work was the housekeeping and children.

BUT don't forget what housekeeping meant. If she did not see to the vegetable garden and poultry yard the family went hungry. If she did not see to the preserving of food and making and baking the family starved in winter. If she was not thrifty and careful with the milk and cream she could not make butter and cheese for winter. If she oversaw the health of her family and livestock then all prospered.

A well bred and wealthy lady told her servants what to do to see to all this. A housewife might have to do all of it herself.

I will be yelled at for saying this but most romances just use history for a pretty backdrop and have a modern hero and heroine

funidream said:

Your first step should be a visit to your library.

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This bears repeating.

You mentioned you need "anything and everything" on the time period... no message board post is going to contain all the information you need. Read books written during that era, read the letters and journals of men and women who lived then. The circumstances of the time period will play a strong role in making your characters who they are.

PDR's comment about history being used as a backdrop is on target in a lot of romances that I've read. The author creates a heroine with modern sensibilities and plops her into the middle of some century in which people whisper about what a willful girl she is, when in reality, people simply didn't behave that way. For it to be effective as a historical, IMO, the time and the place need to be as well defined as the human characters.

Read Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series (set from 1743 to the American Revolution) or Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin books (1810 - 1830) for an example of how the land or the sea and the time itself are crucial to the character development. O'Brien's series is not romance, obviously, but it's a worthy read if you want to get a feel for good historical novels. Also, believe it or not, some of the American Girl stories in the children's section do a nice job of portraying family life during various times in history -- Felicity is the American Girl who lives during the Revolutionary war, and she's a lot of fun to read about.

Ultimately, the best kind of resource you can find is primary sources in your local library or historical society.

pdr said:

I will be yelled at for saying this but most romances just use history for a pretty backdrop and have a modern hero and heroine

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I'm not yelling - the sound you hear is applause 'cause what you said is unfortunately too true!

"Everyday Life in Colonial America" - one of The Writer's Guide To... series would also have some basic, beginning information that might help

O'Brian

PattiTheWicked said:

Read Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series (set from 1743 to the American Revolution) or Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin books (1810 - 1830) for an example of how the land or the sea and the time itself are crucial to the character development. O'Brien's series is not romance, obviously, but it's a worthy read if you want to get a feel for good historical novels.

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Aubrey gets trapped in France after the Treaty of Ameins falls appart so some of the books must be from as early as around 1801-3. There's also a sort of a romance or two...not just in the music and whatnot between Aubrey and Maturin, but with Sophie and her cousin Diana and Aubrey and Maturin. Diana is pretty willful and duels ensue...not exactly romantic, but fairly entertaining in sexual terms at least.

ironic

PattiTheWicked said:

This bears repeating.

Read Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series (set from 1743 to the American Revolution)

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Kind of a funny reference in the context of this thread, because Gabaldon litaraly takes a modern day character and plunks her into the 18th century via time travel.

funidream said:

Kind of a funny reference in the context of this thread, because Gabaldon litaraly takes a modern day character and plunks her into the 18th century via time travel.

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Which, in turn, gives the author an opportunity and a reason to describe the mundane, the everyday, the details that this writer is looking for!

I don't like Gabaldon's novels, but her research is punctilious!

I enjoyed reading most of the Outlander series, and I agree that Gabaldon's research is well-founded - I just thought it was an ironic example in the conjunction with-

"The author creates a heroine with modern sensibilities and plops her into the middle of some century"

And though I read her books and was entertained by the premise (because how cool would it be to travel back and forth through time?) I don't consider the Outlander series to be pure historical fiction, because of the time travel element.

Having a character in the mid-18th century who knows about things like germs, the outcome of the American Revolution, etc. and carries handy things like antibiotics into the past, allows the author liberties in story telling that do not exist when writing pure historical fiction.