Join me today in welcoming RITA® award-winning author Charlotte Henry!
An Accomplished Woman
An Accomplished Woman
by Charlotte Henry
In Pride and Prejudice, Caroline Bingley famously defines an accomplished woman:
“… no one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, and the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.”
“All this she must possess,” added Darcy, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”
In The Rogue Not Taken, the second book of the Rogues of St. Just trilogy, my heroine Rowena Penrose is getting tired of people referring to her as “the accomplished one,” as though her sisters were not and she herself has nothing more to offer than the ability to entertain. The sisters are only one generation removed from the clay pits of Cornwall, so their father has been rigorous in seeing that they are brought up to be gentlewomen. With one sister a painter and the other an amateur sculptor, all of the girls have their talents, but Rowena wants her reputation in the parish to include more.
In her mind, an accomplished woman doesn’t merely entertain others. She must have other qualities, more than her address or her air. Qualities such as compassion, powers of observation, and an ability to make decisions quickly in the service of others. Don’t you think that an accomplished woman looks, in fact, far more like Anne Elliot in Persuasion than like Caroline Bingley? As for my Rowena, her real talent is in the herb garden, making cures for their tenants and anyone else in need. She’s learning from an old herbwoman with a dodgy reputation, which means she has to be discreet about her mentor. I had a little fun with expectations when I revealed the herbwoman’s true identity, forcing the hero to acknowledge that he has to appreciate people for who they are, not who they seem to be—and that includes Rowena.
What do we expect from a modern woman, I wonder? What do we consider accomplishments, or do we even think of them in those terms? For instance, I learned to sew when I was five, was cooking my own breakfast and making my own clothes by ten, babysitting the neighbors’ children by twelve, and taking the train to another city to visit by fifteen. To my family, these kinds of accomplishments were normal. (I never could master the washing machine, though, and to this day wonder why they don’t all look the same so you can figure them out!) Piano lessons were a luxury, but in my parents’ minds, music was a necessity; art not so much. So I didn’t begin to learn to paint until I was in my fifties. But while I think self-expression and a good education can round out a character and give it direction, people still can develop those extra qualities that are not so much observed, as felt by others. Care and compassion. A sense of humor that doesn’t depend on someone else’s humiliation. A world view that values the bus driver or the auto mechanic as much as the professor (spoken as the daughter and sister of auto mechanics).
And unlike in fairy tales, where the angelic heroine is given everything she wishes for simply because she’s angelic, an accomplished woman is happy to work out her own ambitions, sharing what she learns and how she grows with the people around her. In the expression of her talents and her personality, she can make the world a better place. And in that, I think, no matter the size of our sphere of influence, we all have the ability to be accomplished women!
Charlotte Henry is the author of 24 novels published by Harlequin, Warner, and Hachette, and a dozen more published by Moonshell Books, Inc., her own independent press. She writes the Rogues of St. Just series of Regency romances, and as Shelley Adina, writes the Magnificent Devices series of steampunk adventure. She holds an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction, and is currently at work on a PhD in Creative Writing at Lancaster University in the UK. She won the Romance Writers of America RITA Award® for Best Inspirational Novel in 2005, and was a finalist in 2006. She appeared in the 2016 documentary film Love Between the Covers, is a popular speaker and convention panelist, and has been a guest on many podcasts, including Worldshapers and Realm of Books. When she’s not writing, you can find Charlotte sewing historical dresses, traveling for research, reading, or enjoying the garden with her flock of rescued chickens.
Website: shelleyadina.com/charlotte-henry
Facebook: www.facebook.com/authorcharlottehenry
Twitter: twitter.com/ShelleyAdina
Amazon author page: www.amazon.com/Charlotte-Henry/e/B07MPVJ8R1
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