A little over a year ago, I received an email from Maya Rodale, a fellow Regency romance writer, inviting me to speak at a new romance reading series. It was called Lady Jane’s Salon and would meet at a bar downtown called Madame X.
Huh? Romance reading series? Bar? Madame X? Writers get some strange invitations (I’ll share those stories another time—some of them aren’t internet appropriate), but this sounded pretty weird even by my usual standards.
Upon reflection, it was actually a fairly clever notion, getting together a romance reading series. Every other literary group seemed to have them. The poets had their open mike nights (with that strange poet inflection we so mocked in all the writers’ camps I went to as a teen); the mystery writers had their cloak and dagger cabals; the serious Literary writers had their prescribed podia. Why not romance writers, too?
But, still, reading in a bar? This was going to work how? I’d been to bar events before. They invariably involved a lot of bar and not a lot of event. I toddled off to that inaugural meeting of Lady Jane’s Salon with a novel in hand—to donate to Maya’s chosen charity, Share the Love—and a whole bundle of serious doubts.
Take crow; roast lightly; chew and swallow. I am happy to say that I couldn’t have been more wrong.
The upstairs lounge of Madame X was packed with a smart crowd of romance writers and readers, many with champagne flutes in hand. The interior was all red velvet, lush without being louche, with a tiny stage at one end of room. Perfect for balcony scenes! Within in a remarkably short while, the crowd was herded to their seats and the reading began. And it worked. People listened and laughed and clapped in the right places. There was no whispering or chatting at the back of the room—there would be time for that during intermission—just genuine interest and appreciation for the people up there on that podium.
In short, Lady Jane’s was a stroke of genius.
Rather than being a one month wonder, Lady Jane’s Salon has grown from month to month, building up a population of both repeat visitors and friends of friends. Whether writer or reader, everyone is there for the same reason: a shared love of romance fiction. Basically, we’re all romance nerds at heart. This makes for very easy interactions and some occasionally rather bizarre conversations. A recent favorite: “I’m really not attracted to zombies.”
Nowhere else, folks, nowhere else.
I owe Lady Jane’s a personal debt of gratitude, not just for the friendships formed or the warm reception at my reading last year, but because, without Lady Jane’s, I probably wouldn’t be teaching a class at Yale this spring. One of the readers at the first meeting of Lady Jane’s was Cara Elliott, a fellow Yalie turned romance writer. During the intermission, we got to talking about the romance scholarship movement, how much we wished there had been classes taking a serious and literary look at romance novels during our undergrad days. Glasses of wine in hand, we began brainstorming about how we would go about crafting and teaching such a class, a survey of the Regency romance novel from its origins in Austen to its more eccentric offshoots today—and now we’re teaching it. Thanks, primarily, to Lady Jane’s.
Lady Jane’s has done all of us in the romance writing and reading community a vast service by providing us a place to meet up and, yes, share the love.
I hope you’ll join me on Monday in raising a great big toast to Lady Jane’s Salon and her founders. Many, many happy returns of the day, Lady Jane!
Thank you to the lovely Lauren Willig–New York Times Bestselling author and repeat Lady Jane’s Salon reader–for this wonderful blog post! She will be reading from her latest, The Betrayal of The Blood Lily.