The research for the Ransome Trilogy begins with my falling in love with a certain movie I saw in the 1980s. As a matter of fact, we watched it in my British Literature class my junior year of high school during the two weeks after the seniors graduated (the whole class but four of us) and before the rest of us got out of school. That movie? Pride and Prejudice (the one with the best Mr. Darcy, David Rintoul).

Though it would be five or six more years before I would fall in love with Austen’s work in writing (I loved history, but my focus was on the American Civil War when I was at LSU and the few years after when I lived in Northern Virginia, thus most of my reading/writing focused on that), I trace my love of the late Georgian/early Regency era to seeing that miniseries when I was seventeen years old.

By the time I returned to college in the late 1990s, I’d already fallen in love with Austen’s work, my favorite being her last completed novel, Persuasion, which I experienced for the first time when I was twenty-seven years old—the same age as Anne Elliot, the heroine. I connected instantly and deeply with Anne, someone who’d fallen in love at a young age, then lost that love and had never found another. And I absolutely and irrevocably fell in love with Captain Frederick Wentworth. This was helped along, I believe, by the unequaled 1995 theatrical-release adaptation of the novel, starring Amanda Root and Ciaran Hinds, which, to this day, stands as my favorite of all of the film adaptations of Austen’s works.

When it came time to write a literary criticism thesis when I was a senior in college, I wrote it on “Wealth and Social Standing as a Theme in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.” I’ve excerpted sections of the paper in these two posts:
Fun Friday–Pride & Prejudice (Part 2)
Fun Friday–Pride & Prejudice (Part 3)

Then, as I mentioned in the Inspiration post, I saw the Horatio Hornblower films, and that was what sealed the deal for me, so to speak, in my decision to try writing something set during that era. I already had the research I’d done for my lit-crit thesis, and my love of Austen’s works, to begin with as research for all of the social aspects of the story. But all I had to go on for my hero were Austen’s vague mentions of the Royal Navy in her works and what was deemed interesting enough to put on screen in the Hornblower films and Master and Commander. Where to begin?

Well, there aren’t a lot of readily available research materials on the British Royal Navy of 1814 in Nashville, Tennessee. And while I could find some information online, I knew I couldn’t depend on all of it being accurate. I needed some research books. So I decided to see what I could glean from C. S. Forester’s and Patrick O’Brian’s novels. And sure enough, there were lots of great things in there. The problem was I wasn’t sure I understood all of them. I needed to know what the command structure was. I needed to know how one went about getting promoted. I needed to know the daily schedules and duties.

Thank goodness that fans of Patrick O’Brian’s novels felt the same way. Once I started looking up information about Patrick O’Brian’s novels on Amazon, they started suggesting some nonfiction companion books I might be interested in (and while this penchant of Amazon’s to suggest things to you based on items you’ve searched for can be annoying, in the instance of research, it’s wonderful!). The first book I bought was Patrick O’Brian’s Navy, a “coffee table” (oversize) book complete with plates of period artwork and illustrations, as well as information on everything from daily food rations to duty schedules to what disciplinary action was meted out for what offenses. Another book that I’ve found invaluable is A Sea of Words, a dictionary of unique nautical jargon used by the Georgian Royal Navy. But I also picked up several novels set during the era: a few Hornblower books, a couple of O’Brian books and several books in Alexander Kent’s Bolitho series. Because not only did I need to be familiar with the terminology and the technical aspects of life in His Majesty’s Royal Navy, I needed to see it “in action”—on the page, in dialogue, in action narrative.

Once I immersed myself in this research, I figured I’d never be able to watch those movies again, sure I’d be nitpicking every little bit of historical inaccuracy. But I have to tell you: they strike pretty close to the mark!

Now, when you read Ransome’s Honor (hitting bookstore shelves in TWO WEEKS!!!), you may wonder at the amount of time I spent researching the Royal Navy when William spends very little time aboard his ship in it. Well, while he may not be on his ship, we’re talking about a man who’s spent the last twenty-two years of his life—since he was twelve years old—living aboard ships, serving as a midshipman, then a lieutenant, and now a captain in the Royal Navy. I had to know all of that because he knows all of that. At least 90 percent of the research someone does for a novel will never appear in its pages . . . except for in the depth it gives to our characters, settings, and plots.

I’d asked about doing a bibliography in lieu of acknowledgments in Ransome’s Honor, but my editor didn’t go for it. So here is the bibliography of books and websites I used for research purposes when writing Ransome’s Honor. And many of them will once again be put to use in another three or four weeks as I get started on Ransome’s Crossing.

Adkins, Roy. Nelson’s Trafalgar: The Battle That Changed the World.

Austen, Jane. Persuasion: A Norton Critical Edition.

Critical articles used: “The Language of Feeling” (Julia Kavanagh); “New Landscapes” (A. Walton Litz); “Moral Luck and Judgment in Jane Austen’s Persuasion” (Robert Hopkins); “Anne Elliot’s Education: The Learning of Romance in Persuasion” (Ann W. Astell); “Doubleness and Refrain in Jane Austen’s Persuasion” (Cheryl Ann Weissman).

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice: A Norton Critical Edition.

Critical articles used: “Pride and Prejudice: The Reconstitution of Society” (Alistair Duckworth); “Pride and Prejudice and the Pursuit of Happiness” (Claudia L. Johnson); “Interpreters of Jane Austen’s Social World: Literary Critics and Historians” (David Spring); “Radical Jane” (Edward Ahearn); “A Note on Money” (Donald Gray).

Austen, Jane. Sense and Sensibility: A Norton Critical Edition.

Critical articles used: from “Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799)” (Hannah More); “Sensibility” (Raymond Williams); “Sense and Sensibility: Opinions Too Common and Too Dangerous” (Claudia L. Johnson); “Wills” (Gene Ruoff); “The Novel’s Wisdom: Sense and Sensibility” (Patricia Meyer Spacks); “Taste: Gourmets and Ascetics” (Isobel Armstrong); “Mass Marketing Jane Austen: Men, Women, and Courtship in Two Film Adaptations” (Deborah Kaplan).

Biesty, Stephen. Man-of-War: Stephen Biesty’s Cross-Sections.

Broadside: Home of Nelson’s Navy website.

Cawthorne, Nigel. History of Pirates: Blood and Thunder on the High Seas.

Copeland, Edward and Juliet McMaster. The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen.

Eras of Elegance website.

Forester, C. S. Mr. Midshipman Hornblower (1948), Lieutenant Hornblower (1951), and Hornblower and the Hotspur (1962).

The Georgian Index website.

Girouard, Mark. Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History.

Goodwin, Peter (Keeper and Curator, HMS Victory). Men o’ War: The Illustrated Story of Life in Nelson’s Navy/National Maritime Museum, London.

Hamill, John. John’s Military History website. “Portsmouth: The Royal Dockyard and Gunwharf.”

The Jane Austen Society of North America.

Jane Austen’s World blog.

Kent, Alexander. Beyond the Reef (1992), Cross of St. George (1996), and Sword of Honor (1998).

King, Dean. Harbors and High Seas: An Atlas and Geographical Guide to the Complete Aubrey-Maturin Novels of Patrick O’Brian.

King, Dean. A Sea of Words: A Lexicon and Companion to the Complete Seafaring Tales of Patrick O’Brian.

Le Faye, Deirdre. Jane Austen: The World of Her Novels.

Lewis, Jon E. Life Before the Mast: Sailors’ Eyewitness Stories from the Age of Fighting Ships.

Macquarie University. Elizabeth Macquarie: 1809 Journal.

Miller, David. The World of Jack Aubrey.

National Maritime Museum website.

The National Museum of the Royal Navy website.

Norgate, Martin and Jean. Old Hampshire Mapped website.

O’Brian, Patrick. Post Captain (1972) and The Far Side of the World (1984).

O’Brian, Patrick. Men-of-War: Life in Nelson’s Navy.

O’Neill, Richard. Patrick O’Brian’s Navy.

Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist—The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England.

Portsmouth Naval Base Property Trust. Portsmouth Historic Dockyard Visitor’s Guide.

Portsmouth Royal Dockyard Historical Trust website.

Project Gutenberg. Reminiscences of Captain Gronow.

Ray, Joan Elizabeth Klingel. Jane Austen for Dummies.

Ross, Josephine. Jane Austen: A Companion.

Southam, Brian. Jane Austen and the Navy.

Tierney, Tom. Fashions of the Regency Period Paper Dolls.

Tomalin, Claire. Jane Austen: A Life.

Turner, Barbara Carpenter. A History of Hampshire.

Wallace, Laura. “Food and Drink in Regency England.”

Watkins, Susan and Hugh Palmer. Jane Austen: In Style.

White, R. J. Life in Regency England.

Wilson, Kim. Tea with Jane Austen.

(And there are probably at least a hundred other websites I accessed which I didn’t bookmark that I gleaned tidbits of information from.)