Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion (26 page)

A
lthough
Jane Austen: Blood Persuasion
and my earlier book about Jane Austen as a vampire,
Jane and the Damned
(HarperCollins, 2010) are works of fiction, I feel it’s useful to include some background information about the Damned in England.

The history of the Damned in England lacks documentation and suffers frequent distortion and exaggeration. By the late Georgian period, the Damned were fairly well established, thanks to their association with the Prince of Wales, later the Prince Regent. They lived openly in the most fashionable circles as leaders of society, notable for their debauchery and lewd behavior, both of which were celebrated with appropriate shocked horror and lurid detail in newspapers, broadside ballads, and gossip magazines.

We know that the Damned had been in England since at least the medieval period, although they were regarded as exotic and untrustworthy outsiders and generally kept their activities quiet. It is from this period and other times when the Damned had to assimilate that most of the legends arose: for instance, that they could not tolerate daylight, garlic, or crossing water.

They were active in England in Queen Elizabeth I’s reign and celebrated as exotics, along with Native Americans and Africans, at her court; she certainly found male members of the Damned attractive, and it is quite possible that the Virgin Queen took lovers from among their ranks. Although they continued to be in evidence at the Stuart court (James I also enjoyed the company of handsome male vampires), it is suspected that many of them left England during the Interregnum to return with Charles II, one or more of whose mistresses may well have been vampires. Samuel Pepys makes frequent references in his diaries to the allure of female members of the Damned and fantasized about them during sermons in church.

Many vampires moved to England during the Inquisition in Europe, but one of the most well-known waves of immigration was during the French Reign of Terror, when members of the Damned were executed, immortality being no match for the guillotine. Ironically, in the early days of the French Revolution, the Damned thrived, leading the freethinking, atheist sentiments of the period.

Thus England, by eighteenth-century standards a well-regulated, rational, and tolerant nation, became something of a haven for the Damned, explaining their sudden emergence from the vampire closet. That the Damned lived openly in late Georgian society is obvious from the extensive collection of publications informing mortals, particularly women, on the etiquette of dining with the Damned, when guests might well provide both dinner and after-dinner entertainment.

The popularity of the Damned reached its height after their acts of heroism in leading the resistance against the French during the 1797 invasion, in which Jane Austen, then in Bath to take the waters as a cure against vampirism, found herself involved (see
Jane and the Damned
).

Earlier in the year an unsuccessful and well-documented French invasion had taken place in Fishguard, Wales, after bad weather had thwarted the original plan of landing and taking the major port of Bristol. The invasion was easily routed by the local militia and the populace, including a forty-eight-year-old female cobbler, Jemima Nicholas, who, legend has it, captured single-handed twelve French soldiers. In an ironic twist worthy of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, captured French officers escaped a few months later in the yacht of the English commander.

The November invasion was more successful, thanks to a brilliantly conceived plan tempered with a good deal of luck, in which the French in one coordinated effort took major port cities, rallied the common people, and marched inland to London. The Royal Family went into hiding, the volunteer English militia proved inadequate against the highly disciplined French army, and the English found themselves helpless, demoralized, and deeply shamed by the first invasion of their country in more than seven centuries.

Happily the occupation lasted only a couple of weeks, but the task of piecing together the actual events has challenged historians ever since. First, very little source material remains. The French destroyed many of their records of the invasion, given that it was of such short duration and reflected so poorly on their nation’s military reputation. Given the level of collaboration with the enemy among all strata of English society, families sought to cover up any dubious activity, burning firsthand accounts and other records, and pretending that those two weeks in November held nothing out of the ordinary. In addition, the French seized England’s many local news presses and the Royal Mail system, cutting off communications nationwide.

But the main reason for the cover-up was that the resistance to the invasion was led by the most unlikely heroes and heroines in England, the Damned.

Over the next few years, the Prince of Wales turned his back on his former friends, banning them from the court in 1810. The Damned, scattered over the country, quarreled on how they should conduct themselves—whether they should attempt to live openly or hide. Open conflict broke out, and households disbanded. Some, like Duval’s household, sought revenge against humankind, not endearing them to humans they encountered. Others, like William’s, planned to live quietly until they were once again accepted by polite society. The middle and lower classes, who might have been sympathetic to the plight of the Damned, also received the brunt of a long and ruinous war, massive inflation, and a series of poor harvests; finding themselves in the cross fire of civil war among the Damned was the last straw. Legislation was passed during the Regency period restricting the activity of the Damned and depriving them of property and political power.

Once again, the Damned retreated from public view. We can only speculate what became of them, although many, like Luke Venning, crossed the Atlantic, attracted by the challenges of the Americas. As the Georgian period morphed into the Victorian, it became unthinkable that the Damned had, in effect, once ruled society and saved England, and thus the rewriting of history began in earnest.

A Glossary of the Damned

en sanglant:
to be aroused; to have one’s canines extend. Involuntary and uncontrolled
en sanglant
is considered vulgar and ill-bred.

to dine:
to feed upon mortals, who consider it a high honor and greatly pleasurable.

Bearleader:
a combination chaperone/mentor who teaches the young
fledgling
correct etiquette and manners. The Bearleader is generally, but not always, the
Creator
of the fledgling vampire; the one who turned (created) him or her.

les Sales:
literally, the dirty or unclean ones—cast out and feral members of the Damned. It’s a French word, so the
a
is pronounced like the
a
in
father
.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Su and Keith Blakey for a wonderful visit to Steventon and Chawton in 2010; my agent, Lucienne Diver, and editor, May Chen, for their patience and help in making this a better book; Alison Hill, beta reader (is Jane nicer now?); Steve, for making coffee and performing other services; the staff at Jane Austen’s House Museum and Chawton House; and everyone for listening when I complained about the book that refused to write itself.

About the Author

Raised in England on a diet of Georgette Heyer and Jane Austen, JANET MULLANY has worked as an archaeologist, a classical music radio announcer, a performing arts administrator, a bookseller, and a proofreader/editor for a small press. Her first book,
Dedication
(2005), the only Signet Regency with two bondage scenes, was followed by the award-winning
The Rules of Gentility
(HarperCollins, 2007). She has written three more Regency chicklits for Little Black Dress (Headline, UK) as well as contemporary erotic romance for Harlequin Spice. She lives near Washington, D.C., where she is hard at work thinking up new and terrible things to do to Jane Austen.

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Also by Janet Mullany

Jane and the Damned

The Rules of Gentility

Credits

Cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

Cover illustration © by Silja Götz

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

JANE AUSTEN: BLOOD PERSUASION
. Copyright © 2011 by Janet Mullany. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Print Edition ISBN: 978-0-06-195831-1

EPub Edition © October 2011 ISBN: 9780062101440

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