Author: Emma

Emma Barry is a teacher, novelist, recovering academic, and former political staffer. She lives with her high school sweetheart and a menagerie of pets and children in Virginia, and she occasionally finds time to read and write.

Anniversary of the Battle of Chancellorsville

One hundred and fifty years ago today in northern Virginia, the Battle of Chancellorsville began. It would take a week and claim 24,000 lives. That’s a number that requires a moment to sink in. Maybe it helps to write it out: twenty-four thousand men perished there in fighting over seven days.

Aside from the massive human cost, Chancellorsville is interesting to me because it was the beginning of the apex of the Confederacy militarily. Between Chancellorsville and Gettysburg it seemed quite likely that the Confederacy would win the war.

After years of study as a curious amateur, then as scholar, and now as a writer, I still can’t understand why things were so close for two + years and particularly for those two months. How could the Union — with more than twice as many people (the ratio gets even more unbalanced when you take into account Confederate unwillingness to arm the sizable enslaved population), almost all of the industrial production, and vastly superior infrastructure and wealth — not crush the Confederacy immediately?

The answers to that question (e.g., weak military leadership, hubris, bad luck, differences in culture, etc.) proved so costly it makes me ill. The American Civil War should have ended quickly, but it did not and thus 660,000 people died and cultural rifts were entrenched that still haven’t fully healed (see Confederates in the Attic).

But back to Chancellorsville! It was a decisive Confederate victory, though the death of Stonewall Jackson clouds this assessment, and it set up the dynamic for the war’s true turning point, Gettysburg. Because of his win at Chancellorsville — a win that occurred entirely because of tactics as he had been badly unnumbered — Robert E. Lee felt emboldened to invade the Union and that turned out to be a mistake, though the war wouldn’t end for two more years.

Chancellorsville has a long and prestigious literary history as the subject of Stephen Crane’s novella The Red Badge of Courage, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s short story “A Night at Chancellorsville,” a poem by Herman Melville entitled “Stonewall  Jackson,” and a diary entry by Walt Whitman from the very underrated Specimen Days in America.

On July 1, I’ll be waltzing quite brazenly into the party with my novel Brave in Heart, a historical romance that finds it’s turning point on the Chancellorsville battlefield. I hope you’ll join me there.

A Fine Romance Friday: Only You

I read a number of posts this week about the dearth of good romantic comedies in Hollywood these days (see, for example, Smexy Books). The near-absent of this genre from mega-plexes everywhere confuses me because they’re relatively cheap to make and they appeal to female viewers, who often feel under-served in the current market. Thankfully, there are always the romantic comedies of the past on cable. And today, I’m recommending Only You, Norman Jewison’s Italian travelogue featuring the delightful Robert Downey Jr., Marisa Tomei, and lots of terrific mid 90s fashions.

This film is a riff on The Importance of Being Earnest, except in this case, it’s the importance of being Damon Bradley. Tomei’s character got the name off a Ouija board when she was a kid. She’s given up that silly fatalism until, on the eve of her wedding, she finds Damon Bradley, chases him to Italy, and he turns out to be Robert Downey Jr. Hijinks ensue.

I couldn’t find the clip that I wanted — the late night walk across Rome — so you’ll have to settle for the trailer. But really, this movie is charming and romantic and beautiful and you should watch it with pasta and wine tonight. And then come back here and explain to me why movies set in Italy are always better.

Defining New Adult

I don’t write New Adult, though I have read some of it, and for what it’s worth, I wanted to weight in on the debates about the definition of the genre and its legitimacy.

Jane, founder and contributor to the influential romance review and discussion site Dear Author, defined New Adult back in December as “not just sexed up YA, but an exploration of a time period in a character’s life” and “a newly emancipated person on the cusp of discovering themselves, where they fit into life, what allowances they will make, and how they relate to others.” In other words, for Dear Author, New Adult is about an outlook on life containing a specific narrative structure.

In some ways, this definition overlaps with that of woman’s fiction. Literary critic Nina Baym, in a discussion of nineteenth-century American women’s novels in her book Woman’s Fiction, describes this trajectory thusly, “The thrust of this fiction has to do … with how the heroine perceives herself. … By the novel’s end she has developed a strong conviction of her own worth” (19). So both woman’s fiction and New Adult seem to be buildings romans or self-actualization narratives.

There was an interesting debate on Twitter yesterday about whether New Adult has an upper age limit. Is, for example, Allison Parr’s Rush Me — which I read and liked with reservations — a New Adult book because the hero is 26? I think Rush Me is a bit of a liminal example, not because of the hero’s age but because I didn’t see growth from the characters. It ended with a commitment to change but didn’t show the change on the page.

Regardless, I think the hostility toward New Adult is interesting. It seems to be motivated by the sense that New Adult is a marketing trick, that many of the founding texts are just smutty young adult, and that many of the most popular writers in the genre aren’t very good.

Continue reading “Defining New Adult” →

A Fine Romance Friday: It Happened One Night

What an awful week! I think I lost track of all the bad and traumatizing things happening around the world. Just as I’d get caught on the latest developments in bad story 1, bad stories 2 and 3 and 4 were spinning out of control. As many Tweeted last night, “Is this is the season finale of America?”

In the wake of the worst week in recent memory, we all need something cheerful. I suggest It Happened One Night, Frank Capra’s screwball comedy starring Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable. If you’ve never seen it, it’s a runaway bride story turned opposites attract romance. It’s surprisingly racy, very sweet, and utterly satisfying.

There’s a lot more of Clark in that scene than in the whole of Gone With the Wind, made five years later. But to see if the Walls of Jericho do come down, you’ll have to watch the whole thing.

The Call

It wasn’t a call at all, actually. It was an email. But you know what I mean: the moment you get an offer from a publisher. The moment you start dreaming of long before you finish writing a book and which haunts you for years, until you begin to doubt that it ever will come true.

Mine came a couple of weeks ago.

Let’s rewind. I started writing fiction during National Novel Writing Month in 2011. My first effort, Together is Enough, is a primal scream about graduate school and the politics of higher ed wrapped in a romance novel. It’s basically a hot mess.

Despite the fact that Together is Enough is cliched, badly plotted, and not infrequently hilarious when it shouldn’t be, I enjoyed the writing. A lot. After a lifetime of reading fiction — obsessively, compulsively, voraciously — I was creating it.

It was hard, yo. And I had a lot to learn. Oh did I have a lot to learn! Continue reading “The Call” →

A Fine Romance Friday: Monsoon Wedding

Today’s fine romance is Monsoon Wedding, Mira Nair’s spectacular Robert Altman-esque take on a Delhi wedding, filled with twists and family secrets. And it ends with not one, but two weddings. Seriously, if you haven’t seen this movie, run, don’t walk. It’s romantic, touching, sweet, funny, and flat-out gorgeous.

Tell me that this happened at your rehearsal dinner, right?

Stay dry, my friends.

Beautiful Words

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I realized that I never did a happy dance when I finished The Easy Part. Last week, I rewrote the last 5,000 words, so I’ll go ahead and do that happy dance now. There’s still a smidgen more revision to do but mostly, I’m waiting to hear about queries and working on sequels for Brave in Heart and The Easy Part. I’d like to have opening chapters that I don’t actively hate soon.

A Fine Romance Friday: A Room with a View

Yesterday was a sad day for people who like movies. The loss that’s getting the most attention is Robert Ebert, the beloved film critic. Like seemingly everyone, I adored Ebert’s writing. He was always lucent and he knew what, and why, he liked — an astonishingly rare gift, even for a critic. He wrote about popular film and art film with the same insight and wasn’t afraid to give a good review to a blockbuster or to pan something pretentious. He was also, judging by Twitter, a lovely human being. Popular film writing will never be the same.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala also died. She wrote the screenplays for most of the Merchant-Ivory films, including A Room with a View and Howard’s End, both of which garnered her Academy Awards. In her honor, A Room with a View is today’s fine romance.

Gorgeous. The cinematography, the setting, the acting, and oh the music! I have chills.

For fun, here’s Ebert’s review of A Room with a View, to which he gave four stars and of which he said, “It is an intellectual film, but intellectual about emotions: It encourages us to think about how we feel, instead of simply acting on our feelings.”

Thank you, Robert and Ruth, for showing so much passion about the movies.

Vague Enough for You?

It’s been a weird and wonderful couple of days and I may very soon have some exciting news, which I’m going to hint at vaguely and passive aggressively. Don’t you you hate that? Aren’t I coy and annoying?

So let’s just go with this.

A Fine Romance Friday: In the Mood for Love

One of my favorite romantic films of the 00s is In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar Wai’s achingly beautiful ode to restraint and repression in 1960s Hong Kong. It stars Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai, who were very probably the most attractive people on earth when the film was made. I covet every dress Cheung wears in the film, though I haven’t an ounce of her grace or bearing. It’s slow moving, understated, and seductive as hell.

Also, the music is phenomenal and I may or may not be listening to it right now as I write.