Valentine’s Day often celebrates poetry and grand gestures, but Sophia Holloway reflects on how the characters in her Regency romances find a more practical expression of love far more compelling.

St Valentine is not an obvious patron saint of lovers since he was never associated with love or lovers in the Early Church, and the 14th February as a special day for lovers seems to owe a lot to Geoffrey Chaucer, but however tenuous the connection, it has been a date on which the celebration of romantic love has been focused for centuries. Whilst the commercialisation of the day really got going in the Victorian era, with mass-produced cards, there was already a long-standing tradition of sending cards with verses which could be either copied from books published for the purpose, or the invention of the sender. In either case, the vast majority would definitely fall into the ‘cringeworthy’ verse standard of modern-day Valentine’s cards.  An apparent exception was made to the rule that it was improper for those not yet betrothed to exchange letters, perhaps because ‘poetry’ was a more public and published form of writing.

I had great fun writing truly awful verse for my next traditional Regency romance, Twice Shy, which is due out in June. Mr Escott, an aspiring poet (for which read: foolish youth) looks upon the ‘leading lady’, Miss Elizabeth Ashling, as his muse, and proceeds to send her whole stanzas of utter tosh, which she finds a huge embarrassment. Sorry, Elizabeth, it was fun to write.  

True romance is a long way from flowery verse and bouquets of flowers, and my Regency characters are far more pragmatic than poetic. I think that makes their romantic efforts far more believable. When Mary Lound makes some ‘Lound’s Lucky’ fishing flies as a Christmas gift for Sir Rowland Kempsey in To Catch a Husband, it is something created with time, effort, care and yes, her love. Whilst the gentleman is less creative,  he braves embarrassment when seeking out a perfume that would appeal to her in Floris’ perfumers in Jermyn Street. It is romantic because he wants to please her and because he draws upon his appreciation of her scent, even though it is often overlaid by that of freshly caught trout! Perfume was, and is, an intensely personal thing, and I think that those falling in love are acutely aware of not just how their love looks and sounds, but the perfume they associate with them.

Of course, one of the most common elements of the traditional Regency romance is that neither party is expecting, or sometimes even willing, to fall in love, and seeing how they ‘succumb’ is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the story. Even as the reader watches them fall ever more clearly in love, the characters themselves fail to have insight, or pretend their feelings are not engaged, and inevitably find their dreams haunted by the very person they deny thinking about at all. These lovers would not be sending Valentine’s cards, or bouquets of flowers, but we forgive them because they are very honestly giving their hearts, which is genuinely romantic.

Click here to be the first to hear more about Twice Shy this summer

Sophia Holloway read Modern History at Oxford and also writes the Bradecote and Catchpoll medieval mysteries as Sarah Hawkswood.