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The Big Idea: Madeleine E. Robins
Oct. 14th, 2025 03:23 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
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Eras in the past had a focus on manners — a word that in itself was a code for something more controlling. For her novel The Doxies Penalty, author Madeleine E. Robins revisits a past era to look what maneuvers behind the manners, a thing much more interesting and possibly more sinister.
MADELEINE E. ROBINS:
One of the tasks adolescents face is trying to parse the rules of the world they live in — and the potential penalties. Not the say-thank-you or don’t-kill-people rules, but the subtler rules that may not be spoken but that can bring your life to a standstill if you run afoul of them. As a kid I knew they were out there, but figuring out what they were? How seriously to take them? What the penalties were? That’s a lot for a person already dealing with algebra and puberty.
So I suppose it makes sense that when I was thirteen and discovered Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels I fell hard. So many weird rules (a young lady at a party mustn’t dance more than twice with the same man! a woman who drives down St James’s St. is clearly a whore!) that made little or no sense to me. It wasn’t until I went from Heyer to Jane Austen that I began to understand. Many of the rules were there to “protect” women—which is to say, to control them. Flouting the rules could have life or death consequences. These odd, frivolous rules meant survival.
It’s all there in Austen: a damaged reputation could ruin a woman’s chances at marriage. And marriage was not just the presumed goal of every nice young woman, but an economic necessity. Mrs. Bennett obsesses over her daughters’ marital prospects because the alternative is a life of genteel poverty. Marianne Dashwood skates on the edge of ruining her reputation by making her feelings for John Willoughby so public. Both Lydia Bennett and Maria Bertram teeter over into disgrace and are only saved from being handed from man to man by the intercession of family and friends; others (Colonel Brandon’s first love, for instance) are not so lucky.
These unspoken rules, and the weight of their consequences, fascinated me. I began study the Regency: the rules and manners, but also the politics, the wars, the Romantic movement, the rising tide of technology. It’s an astonishingly rich period; the more I learned, the more I wanted to play in that sandbox. At the time I started writing, alt-history and mixed genre books were not a thing. To play in that period I did what was expected of me (I followed the rules!) and wrote Regency romances, with the manners and the clothes and the rom-com happy ending. But by the time I finished the fifth of my romances I was done with happy endings. I switched to writing SF.
But I wasn’t done with the Regency.
I conceived of Point of Honour, my first Sarah Tolerance mystery, as a “Regency-noir:” a Dashiell Hammett story with an Austen voice. I wanted to wander the mean streets that Jane Austen didn’t mention and most modern Regency romances ignored. The streets where the rules were broken, and where punishment for breaking them was inevitable.
In noir, the protagonist is “morally compromised”(in The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade is not a good guy—he’s just better than most of the people around him). But compromised can mean more than one thing. In the 19th century the word attached to any woman with a damaged reputation, a woman who had had—or was suspected of having had—sex outside of marriage. Or just dancing too often with the same man. Compromised, ruined, soiled, fallen, different terms for the same thing. Sarah Tolerance, Fallen Woman and Agent of Inquiry, has a sometimes uncomfortably solid moral compass, but by the rules of her society she is ruined: unfit for marriage or respectable employment.
How did that happen? At sixteen she fell in love with her brother’s fencing teacher and they eloped. Years later when her lover died, she faced the world with almost no options: the respectable jobs open to genteel women (companion, teacher, governess, seamstress) are closed to her. A fallen woman can be one man’s mistress, or prostitute herself to all comers. Neither fate appeals to Miss Tolerance
So she does an end-run around the consequence of her ruin: she invents the role of agent of inquiry, using her knowledge of genteel society, her facility with a sword, and her considerable wit, to do the jobs private detectives do: find people, answer questions, solve mysteries. She is out on those mean Regency streets, tracing straying husbands and acting as a go-between in sordid transactions, and all the while operating in a sort of liminal space in her society. She sees the way the rules of her world keep even the most virtuous women vulnerable. In 1812 a married woman’s money and property belonged to her husband, she didn’t even have a say in how her children were reared, unless her husband permitted it. Single women had it slightly better, but any money or property they had was likely to be administered by a man (who could do whatever he liked—and have her tossed into a madhouse if she complained). And women outside the pale of respectable society? They had only as much freedom as the system allowed—which meant that the poor and ruined were constantly in danger.
The Doxies Penalty is the fourth book in the Sarah Tolerance series. In the first three, Miss Tolerance has dealt with murderers, spies, criminals and courtesans. By now she has settled into her role as agent of inquiry and sometime protector of the vulnerable. Then an elderly woman comes to her with a problem: she’s been swindled out of the meager savings which she hoped to retire on. And because this particular old woman is Fallen, she has even less recourse than any other victim: no one to fight for her, no family to fall back on. Miss Tolerance takes the case seeking the swindler and discovers that her client isn’t the only one—that he has left a trail of victims, all of them elderly, Fallen, and defenseless. Soon, many of them are dead.
By the rules of their society these women don’t matter. They made their choices, they broke the rules, and now they have had the bad manners to survive to old age. Poverty and death are the expected consequence of a moral lapse. When a rule-breaker dies, the Law shrugs. Society shrugs.
Miss Tolerance will not. Even if she has to break the rules.
The Doxies Penalty: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
