664. Haunted Abbeys and Hidden History with Alexandra Vasti

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Sarah Wendell: Hello there! Welcome to episode 664 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. I’m Sarah Wendell. My guest this week is Alexandra Vasti. Alexandra is the author of Earl Crush, Ne’er Duke Well, and the Halifax Sisters series, plus we talk a lot about her upcoming September book, Ladies in Hating, which you are going to want to preorder like in five minutes or less. We are going to talk about activism in history and about haunted houses, historical lesbians, and historical erotica. Please be aware, some of this discussion and the accompanying links are rather Not Safe For Work.

A housekeeping note: I recorded this several months ago, and due to a bunch of file corruption and restoration of backups, this episode fell out of my workflow, so I want to offer my apologies to Alexandra for this mishap and to you. This episode is so much fun, and I am so very excited to have completed restoration and be able to share it with you.

I have a compliment this week. This is for Jenni H.

Jenni: Your friend who is obsessed with candles – like, has them all over the house? – every time they light one on a gloomy, gray day, they think of you and they smile.

If you would like a compliment, if you would like to support the show, if you would like to make sure that every episode has a transcript hand-compiled by garlicknitter – howdy, garlicknitter! – [howdy! – gk] – have a look at patreon.com/SmartBitches.

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All right, are you ready to talk about historical lesbians, haunted houses, and all sorts of fun things? Let’s do this: on with the podcast with Alexandra Vasti.

[music]

Dr. Alexandra Vasti: Hello! I’m Alexandra Vasti. I write historical romance, and in my non-romance-writing life I am also a tenured professor of British and Caribbean literature!

Sarah: Fantastic! Nothing to talk about there!

Alexandra: Oh! [Laughs] And I just want to say, I just want to take a second to say thank you so much for having me. I was so delighted to hear from you, and I have been reading Smart Bitches since I was in college, like since it first started. I was in college, and I was devoted, devoted to the website. Do you remember, like, the Cassie Edwards – I’m, of course you do – the Cassie Edwards –

Sarah: Ohhh –

Alexandra: – yes?

Sarah: – yes, I do!

Alexandra: [Laughs] I was glued to the website! Like, you know, I was like, What’s going to happen? What’s going to happen? So, yeah, so you have given me like twenty years of, of pleasure and joy and smart thoughts, and so thank you so much.

Sarah: Thank you. That’s really nice of you to say. I, I do indeed remember Cassie Edwards. She passed away recently, so I feel like I can talk about her again, ‘cause I always felt like when I knew she was older and not in good health it was like punching down?

Alexandra: Right, right.

Sarah: But yeah, that was a whole thing! That was a whole thing, and I honestly thought at the time that that would not get much attention outside of the internet, because at the same time there was a plagiarism scandal with Jerry Seinfeld’s wife writing a cookbook where you grind up food into mush and then mix, mix the good stuff in with other stuff? And someone alleged that she had stolen their, their idea? And I’m like, Oh, that’s the pop-, that’s the pop-, you know, the big popular cultural plagiarism that’s going to get attention. I was, I was very wrong; people were very into the black-footed ferrets and the –

Alexandra: [Laughs] Right, right!

Sarah: – dubious Native American portrayals in all of those books, but okay!

Alexandra: I think, I mean, I had never read her before then, so I think part of what was so fascinating was that when you would read the excerpts, it did sound like…

Sarah: Sounds like AI, honestly, if you look back at it now, yeah.

Alexandra: Yeah!

Sarah: It looks like it was wedged in, it kind of reads like AI, and the thing about Cassie Edwards was that at, at the time, and at the height of her popularity, there weren’t that many publishers publishing romance, and she was ubiquitous. She was in truck stops; she was in bookstores; she was in drugstores; she was in the grocery store. Like, she was everywhere. She was one of those authors that just had ubiquitous coverage of all the places where you buy books. So it was a very big deal to start talking about her because to a lot of people she was one of, like, the big figures of romance at the time.

Alexandra: Absolutely!

Sarah: Oh darn.

So I’m very excited to talk to you about your book? I love the idea; I love the whole title Earl Crush. Super great; awesome, cute title. Can you tell me the premise of this book?

Alexandra: Yes! Absolutely, and I thank you for the compliment on the title. I love pun titles. I feel quite lucky that I happen to be, you know, coming up in an era of when the pun title is still popular and, and people like it!

Sarah: Yes!

Alexandra: I remember K. J. Charles, I think, had tweeted like, What we need to do with pun titles is just go harder and, like, lean into their goofiness. And I feel like, you know – [laughs] – that is…

Sarah: Hundred percent!

Alexandra: Like, you are right, K. J. Charles! Let’s make them even wackier! So I, yeah, so this is Earl Crush. So the premise of Earl Crush is that Lydia, our heroine, has severe social anxiety. She has really struggled with the social demands of being in this society in, in 1818. She’s had quite a few terrible seasons, and, however, at the same time, she’s very politically minded and politically radical, and she really wants to be involved in the political world in a way that she doesn’t feel like she has access to because of her social anxiety and because she’s a woman, an unmarried woman in 1818. So she starts writing these anonymous political pamphlets which are distributed through Belvoir’s Library, which is kind of set up in book one, and it’s what unites the books in the series. And so, so as she’s been writing these pamphlets for a couple of years, she starts corresponding semi-anonymously with this earl in Scotland who is sort of like-minded. And so after they’ve been corresponding for a couple of years, she finds out that he is destitute; he’s on the verge of financial ruin. She’s like, Well, you know what? I have money! I’m an – and I’ve not been having it go well with the marriage stuff, so she decides she’s going to go up to Scotland and propose a marriage of convenience to this earl that she’s been corresponding with. So she, so she does. This is the, this is, I’m not spoiling anything; this is the first scene of the book. She gets to his castle; she knocks on his door; he opens the door; she proposes; and he’s like, Lady, I have no idea who you are. And it turns out that his brother has been catfishing her for the last three years. Yeah.

Sarah: Ohhh!

Alexandra: So yeah, that’s, that’s not a spoiler; it’s the first, it’s the first scene. So, so they have to team up to sort of hunt down this scoundrel of a brother, fall in love. You know, there’s spies, betrayals, plots.

Sarah: That is a lot.

Alexandra: It’s a lot, yeah. I like, do like plot. I like, I like, I like a lot of – I think it’s because I was sort of raised with these ‘90s romances, these ‘90s historicals where so much happened? Right?

Sarah: There’s so much plot. So much plot. It was basically shtupping through history. So much plot. Like, I learned so much about Tudor England from Bertrice Small? Like, it’s incredible. She’s my major source for all the Tudor knowledge that I have. And, her and Jude Deveraux.

Now, one thing that catches me about your books is that you write about people who are political and have been in activist circles at that time. So people really were political and activist at that time, huh?

Alexandra: Yeah, absolutely! [Laughs]

Sarah: Yeah! People, people right now, a lot of people, it’s like, Oh, I don’t like politics in my romances. Like, first of all, you’re in the wrong genre, ‘cause it’s all politics, but second of all, people have always been this way, right?

Alexandra: Absolutely. Yeah, I, I love writing about sort of real, real issues that were really going on. So in this book they talk about, like, divorce laws for women; they talk about the Clearances, and that was a big part of, of what was going on. I had like a, sort of like elaborate discussion of, like, spycraft and the Home Office corruption that I had to take out ‘cause I was getting too in the – I was like, All right, you can only have like four major political issues that you want to talk about, Alex.

But yeah! I, of course these are, people were absolutely constantly talking about these things. So in my first book, Ne’er Duke Well, the, the main character, the, the male main character is an abolitionist, and sometimes I think when people think about, you know, the history of enslavement, they’re like, Well, you know, people were just of their time. They thought that that was normal! But no! People, there were many abolitionists! People were absolutely talking about this and, and making the argument that this was wrong and bad. And so he, I talk a little bit about his, his speeches that he gives, and, and I used real speeches! The real texts of actual speeches from, you know, the 1790s, from the early 1800s, because people were absolutely having these conversations. So I think that that’s really, really important to, to bring in these real historical people and to also explain, you know, in my Author’s Notes that these are real things that people were really saying!

Sarah: Absolutely. I think, much like the idea that regulations are written in blood, any changes that have happened societally have come at the end of a really big activist push that you might not have heard about. Like gay marriage started as a concept and a thing to be active about twenty, thirty years before it happened.

Alexandra: Absolutely.

Sarah: It was a very long campaign.

Alexandra: Yes, you’re exactly right, and I think sometimes, you know, people will say, Oh, well women didn’t really do that; women didn’t really – and, and that’s just not accurate! I have a –

Sarah: That is not true!

Alexandra: – a quote in Earl Crush – all the chapters start with a little epistolary fragment in all the books in the series – so I have a, a little line that, that I’ve put in the voice of my heroine where she says, you know, I’m sick of this idea that ladies have nothing to do with politics. And, but, you know, I didn’t make that up! That’s a, a quote from Maria Edwards in 1834. You know –

Sarah: Yep.

Alexandra: – so it’s very satisfying to me to be able to drop those little bits in there that are real moments. She, all of her political pamphlets, they have these sort of like, you know, very sort of shocking, radical names, titles? And they’re all real titles. Like, they, every single one is, is real from the period.

Sarah: And you can just, like, take them from that historical period and bring them into the book with no problem, ‘cause it’s public domain now.

Alexandra: Right, yes! Absolutely. That’s one of the things that I love about working on the 19th century! Everything is in the public domain.

Sarah: Oh, this is mine now! Ha-ha!

Alexandra: Yes! Everything is in the public domain, and it’s all, a lot of it is digitized! So that has, that makes my research, when I’m doing research for, for my novels, a lot easier than my – [laughs] – research for my academic work, because everything is digitized. It’s, it’s –

Sarah: Yep.

Alexandra: – quite easy to find things online –

Sarah: Yep.

Alexandra: – and to use real primary sources.

Sarah: Is it fun to pick out the epistolary quotes?

Alexandra: Oh my gosh, it’s so – well, a lot of them I make up. So it’s, it’s –

Sarah: It’s more fun!

Alexandra: Yeah! [Laughs] It’s, might include little bits of everything. I, so the, the third book in the series is about rival Gothic novelists, and oh my God, I had the most fun (a) reading real Gothic novels and pulling quotes from them. Fantastic.

Sarah: Oh yes.

Alexandra: But also just, like, making them up? Like, writing in the style of an early 19th-century Gothic novel and yes, I loved it. I loved my life.

Sarah: ‘Cause I know in the ‘90s and the ‘80s we had purple prose. What would you call the prose of the original Gothic novels? Like –

Alexandra: Oh yeah!

Sarah: – extra purple? Deep mauve?

Alexandra: [Laughs] Indigo for –

Together: Yes!

Alexandra: I mean, it’s just delicious!

Sarah: [Laughs]

Alexandra: So dramatic, so many exclamation marks! You know, everything you just, like, really was so intense. I absolutely love, love, love it.

Sarah: And it’s a slightly different English. You have to, like, get used to the cadence of it and the way the sentences are put together. I don’t know what it is about subordinate clauses in older writing, but my God, they loved like nine, ten subordinate clauses in one sentence, possibly fifteen? Sounds great. A whole page, one sentence? Even better.

Alexandra: Absolutely. I, I was just wrapping up my final grading for my, for my classes –

Sarah: Yaaay!

Alexandra: – courses – yeah, I’m all done: woo! – and I was, I, one thing that I said when I was teaching Dickens this year, I was – I always say this – I say, Dickens’s philosophy was why use one adjective when you can use ten? And, and I say that jokingly, but I was grading these final exams, and the students, like, took this very seriously, and they were like, As Dickens said, why use one – [laughs]. Well, that, I was just making a joke, actually, but it is true. Why use one adjective when you can use ten?

Sarah: I also need to tell you that there is a drag queen named Jackie Beat, and their tour is called Big Dickens Energy.

Alexandra: Oh my God!

Sarah: [Laughs] Isn’t it brilliant?

Alexandra: I love that so much! Oh my goodness!

Sarah: The puns! They’re just never-ending, and I’m so happy!

Alexandra: Yeah.

Sarah: So where did you get started? ‘Cause you, you study a very particular field. How did you get started there?

Alexandra: Okay, I don’t want to talk too much about my academic work, because I, I don’t want someone to, like, google me and, like –

Sarah: Of course.

Alexandra: – connect the dots, so yeah, but, but I’m happy to talk about just, like, how I came up in academics and stuff like that. Would that be…

Sarah: That’s totally fine.

Alexandra: Yeah! So I have always loved historical romance, and, but it really wasn’t until after I got my Ph.D. that I felt like I understood how to do research. You know, I, I had always loved historicals and read many historicals, but when I had tried to write romance, I had always written contemporary before, ‘cause I just didn’t know, like, how would you, like, you know, someone’s wearing a coat with a button, and, like, I want to know what is the button made of? And, and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Alexandra: – I just didn’t know how would you find that stuff out? So it really wasn’t until after I finished my Ph.D., which was in 2019, that I felt like I had the research tools in my toolbox to be able to figure those things out. I can remember there was one book that I was writing, and I, I had this character spill soup on herself, and I wanted all the characters around the table to be telling her how do you, how, their opinions for the best way to get stains out of your dress.

Sarah: Which is a very common conversation in every era ever –

Alexandra: Right!

Sarah: – ‘cause we are clumsy people when we eat, yes.

Alexandra: [Laughs] Right! Exactly! And, like, you know, here’s my Shout pen I happen to have. So the, but what would they have said? And, and so that was that process of having to dive into these, you know, 19th-century domestic management manuals. I read a whole, like, manual that was, like, written for valets that was like, you know, how do you get the wine stains out of your lord’s, like, messy collars?

So anyway, so, but it was, I felt like I, at that point I felt like I finally knew how to find those primary sources and how to dig in and get into them and, and pull my, you know, six different suggestions for how to get the soup, the broth out of her dress.

Sarah: There are so many attorneys writing romance, and there are so many academics that write romance, and I wonder if one of the things they have in common is writing to a specific structure, but also knowing how to do research.

Alexandra: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: Like, my theory with attorneys has always been that legal documents have a very specific structure. This part is here, this part is here, and in the middle there you can make whatever argument you want. Go ham, have fun, but your argument has to fit within the structure, and effectively, romances are arguments as to why these two people have a happy ending, and then they invite you to both feel and believe it. With academics you’re also not only researching something, but you’re also making an argument. Like –

Alexandra: Oh yeah.

Sarah: – I don’t know of any academic papers that are like, Yeah, well, whatever. Doesn’t matter. It’s just like, No; it’s like, I plant my flag here! And I will defend it! So you know, both know how to write into a structure, and you know how to do research –

Alexandra: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – which is very useful. So it makes sense.

Alexandra: Absolutely! And also the – I mean, writing a book takes a long time. It takes a lot of…

Sarah: Just a bit.

Alexandra: – and devotion, right, so I think that, you know, these other fields that involve a lot of writing, especially being committed to a long-term writing project, it makes sense that you could then turn those skills to, to writing a novel as well.

Sarah: Absolutely true.

So with your first book, with Ne’er Duke Well and Earl Crush, you wrote what I think of as an unconventional historical rom-com. But that is my own, you know, determination of, of genre, because as usual, a lot of the genre terms in romance are still too big. They’re still too wide; they still include too many things that are very different, especially contemporary and rom-com, and how has the idea of the rom-com influenced what we conceive of as con-, you know, contemporary romance? What do you see your genre as? Do you see it as unconventional historical rom-coms, or do you, do you think of it as something else?

Alexandra: Yeah. Well, I, I definitely think of my books as rom-coms, and I’ve written a little bit about this before, but to me a rom-com has, what, what makes a book a rom-com for me, as opposed to just a book that has some funny bits is that it incorporates humor or comedy at, like, a variety of diegetic levels. So for example, there’ll be funny lines in a rom-com like, you know, witty banter or a funny one-liner. Then there’s also going to be comedy or humor at the level of a scene? So, like, something funny happens in the scene. In Earl Crush there’s, like, a zebra stampede, and it’s historically accurate zebras.

Sarah: As you do.

Alexandra: Yeah, right. But also, there needs to be something comedic at the level of the premise. So, I don’t know, like a, a, A Week to Be Wicked, for example, which I think is absolutely like a historical rom-com, A Week to Be Wicked by Tessa Dare. Like, the premise is that this, this, you know, paleontologist woman and this rake have to spend the week together, and she has to sleep in his bed every single night; that’s the premise. And that’s funny! I mean, that premise is inherently comedic.

So for me a rom-com has to have humor operating at all three of those levels, and that’s what makes it a rom-com. So that’s absolutely what, what I am trying to do and how I see my books to have humor at the level of the premise and the scene and the line.

Sarah: That makes sense because your, your overarching, unifying theme for the series is this, you know, library, this circulating library, which is, you know, kind of spicy, and that in and of itself is funny. Like I have to keep the secret about how I write, I write, you know, I write and circulate porn-y things. I can’t tell anybody about that, but yeah. It’s funny, I just read a request for help from someone looking for a job, and they’re like, Listen, my job is actually organizing orgies.

Alexandra: Oh! Great!

Sarah: I have to get the place; I have to organize the people; I have to make sure everyone has signed the waivers; I have to make sure we have food and drinks and, and, you know, stuff for safe sex; and I have – this is what I’m doing. How do I put that on a resume? And I’m like, That’s fucking hilarious! Can that please be a book? [Laughs]

Alexandra: Yeah! No, there is inherent comedy in pairing that, like, the logistical preparation. I’m actually very good at this logistical preparation and –

Sarah: Yeah!

Alexandra: …orgies. I hope that’s okay.

Sarah: Yeah!

Alexandra: Yeah!

Sarah: What were you going to say? Please keep going.

Alexandra: No, I was just going to say, I’m not sure that I think my books are, like, especially unconventional necessarily? I don’t know. I see my books as being very much in conversation with a lot of the historical romance authors that I grew up loving?

Sarah: Yes.

Alexandra: Like Amanda Quick and Julie Garwood. I mean, those authors just, like, installed for me the, the humor and the sort of rompy-ness and joyfulness that I love. And then, you know, as I kept reading Loretta Chase and, you know, Julia Quinn and then much later Tessa Dare, like, for me, I see my works as very much in that vein or in that –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Alexandra: – kind of conversation with those, with those authors that meant so much to me and that just really gave me that kind of happy, joyful silliness? But also –

Sarah: Yes.

Alexandra: – for me, something that I try to do and that I think all of those authors do so magnificently is write with a lot of heart.

Sarah: Yes.

Alexandra: I think that they’re funny and silly, but they’re also extremely heartfelt. There’s, there’s a lot of joy in them, and that’s what I try to do.

Sarah: Oh yeah. It’s interesting that you say that they’re in conversation with old-, older historicals, ‘cause I interviewed Courtney Milan earlier in 2024, and she said that exact thing, ‘cause we were talking about how historical seems to be in a state of transition. And I, I, I subscribe firmly to the Bruce Springsteen theory of publishing, which is that Everything dies, And that is a fact, But maybe everything that dies Some day comes back? Spoiler: yes, it does. So, you know, historical romance may be undergoing a shift and a bit of a reemergence or just a, an, an evolution, but one of the things that Courtney Milan said as well was that her books are also in conversation with the books that have happened before? You are a, you know, using similar time periods and creating such different stories out of those same time periods.

Alexandra: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: What do you think are some of the things that are happening in historical romance right now?

Alexandra: Yeah. Well, I, I think you’re absolutely right, and I think that that’s one of the beauties of the historical romance moment that we’re in is that we have authors who are more directly engaging with things that were previously elided, right? Like, when I was growing up, like, heroes would be like, Oh, I spent a decade in India. What were we doing there? We just didn’t talk about it! They were having sex! I, you know, I was reading that stuff when I was like eleven or twelve.

Sarah: Yeah! Oh yeah.

Alexandra: And then suddenly I’m in college and I’m reading, like, Orientalism, and I was like, Oh my God! I read so many, every book that I read for the last twenty years, like, spent, you know, fill, fit in this. Anyway. I actually do an activity with my students where we read Pride and Prejudice, which is a book that does not explicitly engage with British imperialism, and we do a list of all the food that they eat in Pride and Prejudice, and then we map on the globe where all those food items came from, and –

Sarah: Fascinating!

Alexandra: [Laughs] It’s a good lesson. It’s a really good class. And so we talk about how – it, it’s actually a really fun class, because a lot of times it’ll be something like white soup, and I, and I teach them how to find, like, what did that actually mean? And to use the primary source documents. It’s quite, it’s quite – I’m glad. Anyway, so we talk about how even though maybe it’s not explicitly engaging with British imperialism, it is embedded in the fabric of those works, and there is so much to talk about, about imperialism and colonialism in, even in something like Pride and Prejudice, for example.

So yeah, so I think that, that for a lot of the historical romance that I grew up reading, it was embedded, but it wasn’t explicitly discussed or challenged? And then –

Sarah: Yes.

Alexandra: – you know, now, or, you know, for the last decade, we have seen it become increasingly explicit and challenged on page and challenged by the characters, which people, as we’ve already talked about, which people really were doing in the 19th century, a lot!

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Alexandra: So it’s, it’s been really satisfying to read that. I do think that, you know, as a long-time lover of historical romance, of course we see that it is taking up a much smaller portion of the market. Like, when I was growing up it seemed that most romances were historicals.

Sarah: Oh yeah.

Alexandra: Of course that’s not the case. Just objectively, it is a smaller piece of the overall pie now, a much smaller piece, perhaps increasingly shrinking. But I, I hope – I mean, I write books that I feel are intentionally very accessible, and –

Sarah: Mm-hmm.

Alexandra: – I, I wanted covers that look the way my covers look. This is what I asked for: I wanted covers that are very friendly and welcoming, and I, I just really want – I don’t know; I’m hesitant to speak about the genre as a whole, but I wanted my books to feel like something to, that, to feel like they were saying, Come on in; the water’s fine. Because I think we have a lot of young people who are newer to romance who’ve never tried a historical, and they might love it, actually, if they tried it. I mean, maybe they won’t all, right, but that’s okay. They don’t have to; they just have to try it. So I want my books to kind of feel like an, an extended hand a little bit, because the genre has meant so much to me for such a long time and brought me so much joy and happiness. I love it when people tell me that my books were their first historicals.

Sarah: Oh, that is such a compliment! Oh my goodness!

Alexandra: [Laughs]

Sarah: Wow. That’s such a –

Alexandra: It’s the best.

Sarah: That is a cool compliment, yeah, because contemporary has been the dominant thing now for quite a while, like, a long time. Even if you go back to the period of time when it was Fifty Shades of Grey and BDSM, that was still all contemporary erotic. Not a lot of historical erotic. And I think what’s interesting about historical right now is that you have more historicals in trade format, because very few people are publishing mass market anymore, and you, and like your books, they have covers that fit in the overall aesthetic of romance right now, but also are doing something unique. Like, your, the thing I love about your covers, the thing I love best is how when you read the book there’s little clues about the book in the cover that you don’t see until you’re done? That’s the best!

Alexandra: [Laughs] Well, thank you so much. I will say that my publisher, St. Martin’s, has been incredibly cool about the covers. I mean, from day one I was like, I have a lot of opinions. Fear me. But I asked for Petra Braun, and they gave me Petra Braun, who is the artist. I asked for – I mean, I was like, really I was like, This is how big I want the people to be, you know? I was, I really had a lot of specifics about what I wanted. I wanted a fully illustrated scene. I specifically said, and, and at the time when I asked for this there were none in historical romance. They were like, Can you show us what you mean in historical? And I was like, Nope, because it –

Sarah: No!

Alexandra: – really did not exist in historical. And now it does! Now there are, you know, there are several others, but when I asked for it there were none in, in historical, but they, you know, I was able to show them some in contemporary, and, and they said, Okay, great, we can, we can do that.

And I have, yeah, Petra’s been really great, because every time I send this, like, extremely elaborate PowerPoint, and I’m like, Can you put a little white dog? Like, can you put a green book? Can you – like, these, like, hyper-specific things, and she has done it! The third book cover especially is, like, drawn straight from my imagination; it really looks really cool. I’m excited for everyone to get to see that one soon.

Sarah: All right, I kind of want to see this PowerPoint? You send your illustrator a PowerPoint? That’s cool!

Alexandra: Well I, now, I don’t send it to her; I send it to my editor, editorial team, but I know –

Sarah: Yeah.

Alexandra: – she has seen it, because you can look and see, like, I, I, there’s one page that I send that’s just called Vibes, and it’s like –

Sarah: Yeah.

Alexandra: – weird memes and, like – but you can see how – I’ve posted about it on, on my Instagram, but how, like, from me sending Here are the Vibes to what she actually produced, it is absolutely there. So the Earl Crush cover, they’re sort of like in this runaway carriage, and one of the pictures that I sent on my, like, Vibes sheet was, like, the scene in The Little Mermaid – do you have any idea what I’m talking about? – where, where, when she’s, Ariel has become a human and she, like, takes the reins and she, like, and, and they’re, her hat’s flying off – anyway, that is totally the cover for Earl Crush; she did it.

Sarah: Oh my God, you’re totally right! It is!

Alexandra: [Laughs]

Sarah: Oh my gosh! Totally true. I also love that you’re sending all of these visual cues and ideas to the publisher? I did an interview with Elizabeth Hoyt recently, and we talked a lot about her Pinterest board. Elizabeth Hoyt has –

Alexandra: They’re just –

Sarah: – the greatest Pinterest boards.

Alexandra: Oh, I know her Pinterest boards! Absolutely!

Sarah: They’re amazing, right?

Alexandra: Yes!

Sarah: Here’s a whole collection of random-ass Georgian knickknacks. Do you want to eat the marrow out of a bone with a little itty, little itty-bitty spoon? Here’s twelve different to – it’s so cool! But seeing the visuals that inspire the author I think is really interesting. I think it’s really cool, so I’m fascinated by the idea that you’re going to put together a PowerPoint and send that and be like, Here’s the, here’s the, here’s the vibe and the vision, folks! Here’s what I need. I think that’s very cool! And also very smart to communicate in a way that’s visual as opposed to text, even though the book is all this text.

Alexandra: I feel that I’ve been extremely lucky with how flexible and supportive they have been with these covers. And honestly, like, when I sold these books was 2022…illustrated covers in historical were pretty new! Like –

Sarah: Yeah, very new.

Alexandra: – Evie Dunmore had the first one –

Sarah: Yeah.

Alexandra: – and I, I talked to her, I did an interview with her earlier this year, and she said that when she saw the cover of Bringing Down the Duke she cried. [Laughs] She said she was, Why is the horse blue? You know, I mean, it was quite, I remember when, when Bringing Down the Duke came out and, and the cover was really surprising and unusual, but you know what? They knew what they were doing, because they, they, that book obviously was a huge smash, and it was really the forefront of the trend. I mean, they were on it!

Sarah: There were right. I remember seeing that cover and going, Oh! Ohhh! Interesting! This is new! Huh!

Alexandra: [Laughs] But you know what? That book sold a gazillion copies, so great!

Sarah: It sure did!

I know you have a, have this next book in September, Ladies in Hating. What can you tell me about this book?

Alexandra: Okay, I love this; I’m so proud of this book. All right, so it’s called Ladies in Hating. It is a, sapphic, rival, Gothic novelists is the, is the short pitch. So basically our heroine Georgiana, she appears in all of the books in the series; this is finally her chance to shine. She’s been writing Gothic novels for a while, and she develops this kind of ri-, sort of one-sided rivalry in her mind with this other Gothic novelist who is an anonymous woman, and she is convinced, she becomes convinced that this other woman is stealing her ideas, and she’s very – [laughs] – she’s, she’s going to, she decides she’s going to unmask this other woman and, and tell her to stop stealing all of her ideas, so she does…

Sarah: Speaking of modern people in history, yes! Totally on board; believe everything about it. So this, this other novelist is like her Bitch Eating Crackers.

Alexandra: Yes, yes! Exactly. Everything that happens, she, like, becomes increasingly furious. So she, she decides to unmask this other woman. Again, this is not a spoiler; it’s like, it’s chapter two. She does unmask her, and she sneaks up on her and finds her, and she realizes that this woman, that she knows her! That this woman was the daughter of the butler in her sort of family estate that she grew up, and that she, Georgiana, the main character, had a massive, massive crush on her when she was a teenager. And, and she’s like never…I didn’t mean to, it’s fine, bye-bye, we don’t need to, to talk ever again, please, I beg you. So she sort of runs off, but then they keep, they keep encountering each other, they keep running into each other, and then ultimately as they’re both doing research for their next books they get trapped in a haunted mansion together.

Sarah: As you do.

Alexandra: I had a lot of fun kind of just, like, playing with the Gothic tropes, like, that, sort of for comedic effect kind of like Northanger Abbey a little bit. So it’s very, it’s very sort of rompy, little bit spooky, very sexy. Yeah! It’s fun.

Sarah: Makes sense that it’s being released in September. Totally excellent time.

Alexandra: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: So can you tell me a little bit about this haunted house? Did you draw on historical hauntings? ‘Cause I know that, like, ghosts and spiritualism and mediums were a hot thing in the, back in the day like they are now. I always wonder what somebody from, like, a historical period with the spiritualist movement, if they were driving down like a highway in the United States and they started passing all of those little storefronts where it’s like a big neon sign that says Psychic! Come in for a reading! Psychic! Your future! Like, you ever notice there’s, there’s, there’s al-, there’s one on like Route 3 heading into New York; there’s all over Maryland? Like, there’s just little tiny storefronts with neon psychics? I always wonder what they would make of that. [Laughs]

Alexandra: I think they’d be absolutely delighted. Like, Arthur Conan Doyle, he was like, totally thought all of this was real, which I think is –

Sarah: Oh.

Alexandra: – so interesting, writing these, like, hyper-logical Sherlock Holmes, and he was, like, convinced – [laughs] – that magic was…

Sarah: This was real.

Alexandra: – real, yeah. So –

Sarah: And, and Harry Houdini was like, Bro, no. Mm-mm.

[Laughter]

Alexandra: Yes! Yes!

All right, so you asked me about houses. Like, my, the best thing you could’ve asked me, ‘cause I’m obsessed…

Sarah: Yes! Okay, tell me everything! I’m so excited!

Alexandra: Yeah, so all right. So it’s, it is based on a real place, which is called Fonthill Abbey, which was this guy who is also a queer person in history had inherited this massive, massive fortune from his father for bad things that – [laughs] – mostly, mostly plantations and slavery. So he has this massive fortune, and he decides that he is going to build himself like the biggest, most elaborate, fanciest, weirdest mansion, and he’s going to put all of his favorite things, which were, like, paintings and, like, marble and jewels, and he’s going to stock the house with all these things. But he, he wanted it to be so big and giant and fancy and flashy, and he hired this sort of like shady architect to build it, and it just kept falling down. And he loved it. He loved the fact that his house kept falling down; he, like, thought it was so cool that he was always in the news. So they, they invented all of these very sort of terrible, slipshod methods for building this house that did not work, and it kept falling down, and he did live in it for a while. There are so many absolutely bonkers stories. He, like, hired like a troupe of, like, people with dwarfism to, like, bar the – I mean, it’s just absolutely bananas. Everything about this story is completely wild.

Sarah: If someone was writing that now they’d be like, This is too much; I’m sorry.

Alexandra: It’s too much, right!

Sarah: It’s too much.

Alexandra: It’s too much!

Sarah: I also want to say I googled Fonthill Abbey to make sure I had the spelling right, and there’s this enormous tower, this giant tower in the middle. My guy, what were you trying to communicate there?

Alexandra: [Laughs] So ultimately he had to abandon it ‘cause it kept falling down all the time.

Sarah: I mean, yeah! [Laughs]

Alexandra: He didn’t live there very long, but he left a lot of these treasures inside this house, so there are all these ruins. So I, I, I kind of used this as, like, the basis for my extreme flights of fancy for, for my haunted house that they live in, but there’s a, a queer historian named Ricker, Rictor Norton whose work I love and have read so much of his work, and he visited Fonthill Abbey because it’s kind of this, like, camp icon a little bit? And, and so he has this elaborate description of what it’s like to be in these ruins, you know – [laughs] – two hundred years later, so I sort of just took all that as, like, inspiration for my, for my flights of fancy for the, the house in the book.

Sarah: I love it. I also love that not only are you talking about activists and people who were being seditious and deviant for their time and their social standards, you’re also talking about hidden people, hidden queer people in history, because obviously this was not a thing that you were openly about. I mean, sodomy was still illegal at this point, right?

Alexandra: Yeah, so, right. So sex between men is illegal in –

Sarah: Sex between women: well, they don’t do that, so it’s fine! We don’t need to worry about that!

Alexandra: Exactly what I was going to say. Yeah, sex between women was never criminalized.

Sarah: A million lesbians start laughing. [Laughs]

Alexandra: Mm-hmm. There – I, I love this too: so there were, there are, like, some cases where, in the period, in the 19th, 18th and 19th centuries, like, husbands would try to take their wives to court for adultery with another woman, and they lost, the men, every time, because they’re like, well, that doesn’t count as adultery, but there’s one court, like, transcript that I’ve read – [laughs] – where the judge was like, I don’t really get it. Like, but what are they doing, the ladies? So anyway –

[Laughter]

Alexandra: Sex between women was never…ever.

Sarah: I know there are a lot of women who are married to other women and nonbinary people who listen, and they are probably cry-laughing right now. [Laughs]

Alexandra: I know!

Sarah: What do they do? They don’t have the –

Alexandra: [Laughs] The judge is so puzzled!

Sarah: They have no tower! How do they do anything without a big tower?

Alexandra: [Laughs] Oh! I know, I love it. Yeah, this book is, it’s, it is absolutely packed full of real queer people in history. I used tons and tons of real people. Anne Lister is a favorite of mine, who was a Regency lesbian, who wrote these diaries in code. She was, she had a lot of sex.

Sarah: Good for her!

Alexandra: Yeah, good for her, yeah. And she would write about her, her sexual experiences in code. She ended up getting married. She and her wife had a church ceremonies in the 1800s! So they got married –

Sarah: Cool!

Alexandra: – in a church. Obviously not, not legally recognized, but they, there was a, a, a religious figure who did the ceremony. There’s actually, like, a plaque nowadays in that church that says, like –

Sarah: How?

Alexandra: – the first same-sex marriage in England. Yeah, they went on a honeymoon together, the, you know, Anne Lister and Ann Walker. Anyway, when her descendants found her diaries and decoded them, they literally thought that they had the code wrong – [laughs] – because it was, like, so explicit and filled with her – she was apparently self-reported really good at cunnilingus –

Sarah: Good for her! [Laughs]

Alexandra: – and – yeah! Yeah. Yeah. And they, her descendants were like, that can’t be right! [Laughs] Not her descendants; she did not have children, but, like, her nieces and nephews and everything who had decoded this. Anyway, so I, I…so I talk about Anne Lister and, and there’s, like, a little some, like, lesbian code in the book, and I talk about Byron. It’s just, I had a really good time filling it with, like, real Regency queer people, of which there were many, and of which we have, you know, tons of historical record –

Sarah: Of course!

Alexandra: – in various forms.

Sarah: Is this the, around the same time as the, the ladies of Llangollen?

Alexandra: Yes! Okay, so they are, like, my real inspiration, because they actually lived in a Gothic cottage! Like, they –

Sarah: Yes, they did! Yeah!

Alexandra: [Laughs] So yeah, so they lived in a, so if anyone doesn’t know this story, these two women eloped together twice. They, like one of them, the younger one, literally, like, put on trousers, picked up her dog and her gun, climbed out the window, and eloped with her girlfriend. And the first time their families caught them, but the second time they succeeded, and they were supported by some family money, and they were able to live in this little cottage together. They, they were together for more than fifty years, and people were super interested in them?…

Sarah: Oh my God, they had, like, they had a never-ending series of amazing house guests.

Alexandra: Yeah, they had tons of house guests. Wordsworth wrote a poem about them, but also one of them was the daughter of an earl, so that kind of, like – [laughs] – you know, obviously added some cachet to their, to their story, being part of the aristocracy, but Queen Charlotte was so fascinated by them that she persuaded the king to give them a pension to live on, so they had, they literally lived on a royal pension. So yes, so I was very inspired by, by those Regency lesbians. Did you know about them, that they had a series of pet dogs, and they named them all Sappho?

Sarah: Get out. I did not know that – what?!

[Laughter]

Sarah: Ladies, come on, now! All your Sappho dogs are going to be confused!

Alexandra: I know! Did they call them all, was it like Sappho I, Sappho II? That I don’t know.

Sarah: Although, if you think about it, if you’re, like, yelling across the grounds to your dog, Sappho! Is a great name to yell.

Alexandra: Right?

Sarah: You’ve got lots, lots of vowels for carrying the sound, right?

Alexandra: [Laughs] Echoing across your field in Wales, yeah.

Sarah: Oh, their dog got lost again. They’re just yelling about lesbians.

[Laughter]

Sarah: It, another thing that seems to be true then and now – I mean, definitely true – is that if you were a person who had some means, you had a lot more freedom to live however you wanted. And even within the limiting confines of what was expected of women at that time, if you had influence, money, powerful friends, powerful parents, you could maybe get away with doing things your own way and not following the, not following the expected path. And one of the things that’s so interesting about historical romance is that it is full of people who are not following the expected path –

Alexandra: Mm-hmm.

Sarah: – and yet our concept of the genre, especially looking back at the older titles, was these were stories of, of, mostly about conforming into a historical structure, but they’re not; they’re not at all.

Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah! I think you’re absolutely right, and I think that that, you know, I think it says something that – I don’t know if you read Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma Alban that came out, her debut, that came out last year that I really enjoyed, and it, it talks about this exact issue of, you know, women who are part of the aristocracy versus women who are working class and how that affects their ability to, to live queer lives and to be –

Sarah: Mm-hmm!

Alexandra: – less open about that, and to some extent I think that it, it, for women at least, it might have been easier if you weren’t part of this society that’s expecting you to, to marry and to go on the social scene and to marry for money and to marry for, you know, for, for social cachet –

Sarah: Yeah.

Alexandra: – and for, to unite the families and the land.

Sarah: Political dynasties, land and money –

Alexandra: Right!

Sarah: – and money and land.

Alexandra: But I think that that’s really reversed for men. I, we see a lot of rich and powerful men just, like, depart England because England is very hostile to queer men, and so having the means to move to, move to Greece or move to Italy, somewhere – move to France – somewhere where it is a lot less looked down on in the period. So I, I do think that, that for men, I think we see having wealth and privilege was a huge advantage to, to living openly as a queer person.

Sarah: Same is true now, unfortunately.

Alexandra: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely!

Sarah: I know that you do historical erotica Reels. They’re awesome. Tell me all about these. I will link to, I will link to as many as I can, but please tell me.

Alexandra: Please do. Okay, so how this started: so I did not have any social media, even personal social media before I started, like, this author journey. So, like, in 2022, when I got my agent, she was like, Hey, like, I googled you – [laughs] – and you don’t exist! So, like –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Alexandra: – do you think you could start an Instagram or something? And I was like, Okay. And, but what I discovered is that, like, there is a whole world of people who have, apparently, the same niche interests that I do and are actually interested in these things that I am fascinated by. So one of those things is, like, historical erotica. So for Ne’er Duke Well, right, this is the first one where I introduce the library which has all of these – so, so the main character, the heroine starts this library for the purposes of sex education for women. She’s sort of horrified by the way that society tries to restrict information for women and, and, and how that, you know, impacts them sexually and in a variety of ways. So she starts this library with this secret catalogue that you can only access if you’re, you know, female. And –

Sarah: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Alexandra: Yes! Oh, absolutely. I was just rereading this book the other day, ‘cause I wrote it in like 2021, and I was like, Wow, I was so angry – [laughs] – in 2021 about, about book banning, and boy, nothing in, it’s getting worse maybe. Anyway, I wanted this obviously fictional library to be stocked with real books, real books from history. Like, and I was like, What, you know, what did sex ed look like? What would, what would you have put in this library if you wanted to give books to people to find out more about how sex works? And so, man, I just looked at so much 18th- and early 19th-century erotica! I mean, sex ed texts –

Sarah: [Laughs]

Alexandra: – and also erotica and, you know, it’s, honestly, it’s not bad. The Vic-, when you get to the Victorian period, that’s when things started to get really horrifying, I felt. But they, the 18th-century stuff was surprisingly kind of jolly. Anyway, so I loved it, and I found that when I started sharing fun facts about the period that people also really liked them and enjoyed hearing these, you know, just bonkers stuff, like what are some of the things that, that they called the penis in the period? [Laughs] Because some of them are really strange and odd!

Sarah: Such as?

Alexandra: Okay, so the Victorian one that I really love is intromittent apparatus. It’s just so Victorian! It’s so, like, horrifyingly unsexy! [Laughs]

Sarah: Intermittent apparatus.

Alexandra: Intromittent apparatus.

Sarah: That sounds like, isn’t there a song by King Missile called “Detachable Penis”? That sounds like what they’re talking about!

Alexandra: [Laughs] I mean, you just imagine, like, did people really use this? Like, oh! George, your intromittent apparatus is showing! Pull up your trousers, George!

Sarah: Oh geeze! Intermittent apparatus. That is extremely unsexy.

Alexandra: But yeah…so fun to sort of see this community of people who are interested in these things that I really had no idea was out there. I love to make and share these things. Another fun one that I loved learning was that there is a slang word that in the 18-, or sorry, in the, in the 18th century, larking, and we almost don’t know what this term meant, this slang term. So in Francis Grose’s dictionary of slang in which he defines everything, I mean all sorts of things, he puts larking, and then he just puts that this is like an, an obscene act too lascivious to be described. And, and scholars of course were like, What is it? [Laughs] We needed to know, what is this, like, obscene, lascivious act? And we almost don’t know, except there’s one engraving that is called “The Larking Cull,” meaning gentleman, and he’s, he’s, he’s larking! So in my first book I, I make a joke where –

Sarah: Oh, he sure is!

Alexandra: – one of the –

Sarah: Oh, boy oh boy!

Alexandra: [Laughs]

Sarah: Y’all, it’ll be, it’ll be in the show notes. I won’t let you down; don’t worry. It’s in the British Museum; it’s legitimate. You can even look at it at work, people.

Alexandra: Larking Cull, C-U-L-L, don’t look at it at work. And in the first book I, I, I have the, the female main character use the word larking and just sort of a little joke to myself, mostly. The, the hero is like, I don’t know what that is! And my agent was like, Alex, I think you need to define what it is in the book, and I was like, Okay, I will! [Laughs] So if you read Ne’er Duke Well, or if you google The Larking Cull, you can find out what this – and you know what, it’s not that shocking! Like, I really, I, I think it’s, it’s one thing that I think is very interesting, like, what was considered, like, a very typical sexual act and what was considered really shocking? It’s interesting that this was so shocking, ‘cause I, I don’t consider it –

Sarah: Well, his intermittent apparatus is nowhere near her baby-maker, so that’s probably why.

Alexandra: There is that. His fingers are, though, if you look closer.

Sarah: His fingers are, though, but there’s no, you know, byproduct of that action. So I’m wondering if it’s, like, so obscene because it’s clearly just for prurient pleasure.

Alexandra: Yeah, yeah. There’s a poem that goes along with it, too. You can just fulfill your – [laughs]

Sarah: Okay, y’all, don’t look at this at work. I mean, it’s the British Museum, it’s probably not blocked, but you don’t want this on your monitor if you’re in a cubicle? Like, not at all.

Alexandra: Mm-mm.

Sarah: I’ll let everyone discover it with me because – [laughs] – I won’t tell y’all what it is. I’m terrible.

[Laughter]

Sarah: So research is fun for you, clearly.

Alexandra: It’s so fun; I love it. And you know what? I think that so often we have this perception of the historical past that it was, like, prim and proper and oh, people didn’t do those things then, and obviously that’s not the case! But I think there is something dangerous about that narrative, actually, and I think it can really contribute to the idea that we need to limit sexual information from people or that people can’t talk about –

Sarah: Yes.

Alexandra: – their sexuality or that their sexuality needs to be hidden or closed off. We need to go back to the good old days! And, and I think that that is a huge problem, that narrative. So for me it is a fun and hilarious, but I also think there is an important purpose to being really clear about what the historical past actually was like in terms of sex and sexuality.

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, if you look at people who are saying that the trad wife movement is a, is, you know, a movement back in time to a more proper time, like, that time never existed! That was not a real time! You made that up! It is not real! [Laughs]

Alexandra: Yep. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Sarah: So it is really important to be clear: people did talk about sex; people did go larking; people did, people did extra-sexy things! They just put it in code. I, I’m fascinated by the, Wait a minute, how did we break this lesbian code? She’s talking about going down on women; this can’t be right.

[Laughter]

Alexandra: It’s like, What if we’ve erred? But no! They had not.

Sarah: And of course it’s her descendants who were like, Uhhh, did you guys know about this? I didn’t know about this.

Alexandra: [Laughs] I mean, I think that they knew, right, because she was married to another woman, but then –

Sarah: Yeah.

Alexandra: – I, I think that they were shocked by the frankness and, like, the level – [laughs] – just the range of her experiences! They had not expected that.

Sarah: Oh my.

Alexandra: She was a hottie. She, she was, like, just stone-cold hottie.

Sarah: Awesome.

Alexandra: [Laughs]

Sarah: So I always ask this question: what books are you reading that you want to tell people about?

Alexandra: Okay, I am reading, I just finished reading Gabriela and His Grace by Liana De la Rosa. Love Liana De la Rosa. I love historical romance. This book comes out, I was lucky enough to read it early, but it comes out next year in August. So highly recommend Liana De la Rosa. It is the third book in the Luna Sisters series, and it is so fun! There’s a ship; there’s only one ship cabin. It’s, it’s, it’s delightful.

And I just started The Teller of Small Fortunes by Julie Leong.

Sarah: That’s so beautiful!

Alexandra: Yes! It’s so, and it’s so lovely, and you know what, I love books that are just kind and, and warm, and that is exactly what this is. It’s very, it feels a very wintry book to me? Like, it’s just this, just this cozy, delicious – it’s so lovely! So I’ve just started it; I’ve not finished it, but so far I highly, highly recommend.

Sarah: It’s interesting because writers like Emma Alban and Evie Dunmore and Liana De la Rosa and yourself and Courtney Milan, like, these are the people that I point to when I’m like, Okay, no historical isn’t dead; it’s something different and new. It’s evolving, and this is where it’s going, where you have writers like Liana De la Rosa and Adriana Herrera who are writing wealthy people from not-England. The idea that there are countries and there are other rich people in history that weren’t in England is just, like, so mind-blowing still to so many people, and it’s like, Wow! Okay! Yikes!

Alexandra: Absolutely! Yeah, I mean, I, so my re-, my scholarly work, I do, I work on British literature, but I also work on Caribbean literature. So I, I, I’m obsessed with Adriana Herrera – [laughs] – maybe in an unhealthy way. I just, like, her books speak to all the sides of my brain and all of my interests and, you know, when she’s writing about the, you know, the Exposition in Paris and how they had all of these countries in – I mean, and it’s, it’s all real and it’s all so just, like, glamorous and interesting and fascinating and rich and, and global, and I love it so, so much. Yeah. A Caribbean Heiress in Paris is, like, just such a fantastic book. They’re, they’re, everything that I want in historical romance, because they’re super fun. I mean, like, they go up to the top of the Eiffel Tower and have champagne and, you know, do sexy stuff on top of the Eiffel Tower. I, that is all I want in my life, in my historical romance and maybe my life. I don’t know; I don’t want to get arrested, though, so not my actual life. But they’re also just filled with, you know, real grappling with colonialism and –

Sarah: Yes!

Alexandra: I mean, it just shows that you can have a book that has it all!

Sarah: Where can people find you if you wish to be found?

Alexandra: Well, you can find me on my website, which is alexandravasti.com, or my Instagram or TikTok with are, which are both @alexandravasti, and you can come, come for the – [laughs] – historical erotica Reels!

[outro]

Sarah: And that brings us to the end of this week’s episode. Thank you so much to Alexandra. This was so much fun, and I really didn’t want to try to capture the magic twice.

We talked about a lot of books. They are in the show notes or at smartbitchestrashybooks.com/podcast under episode 664.

As always, I end with a dreadful joke, and this is dreadful, so hold onto yourself.

What do you call two birds that are stuck together?

Give up? What do you call two birds that are stuck together?

Vel-crows.

[Laughs] I can hear you groaning. I’ve been feeding the local crows since about 2020, and they nag me now. There’s like, Where’s our food? Where’s a food? Where’s the food? I will have to post some pictures of the crows. I have one who’s really, really big – they’re fish crows, so they’re massive? His name is Bro Crow. I will try to post a picture the next time I see him.

On behalf of everyone here, we wish you the very best of reading. Have a wonderful weekend, and we will see you back here next week.

And in the words of my favorite retired podcast Friendshipping, thank you for listening; you’re welcome for talking.

[end of music]