reviews_and_ramblings | Elizabeth Mansfield (?

Readers of Regency novels say that Elizabeth Mansfield was the heiress to the literary crown of Georgette Heyer, the high priestess of Regency novels. But Elizabeth only smiled at the appellation. After all, she was the writer who admitted, "I received a Master's degree in English lit, but I secretly read Georgette Heyer in the bathtub."

She believed that the love story has been with us ever since people began telling stories, and it will continue to be with us until the world ends.

"I was born and grew up in New York City," said the freshfaced blonde, who was born on March 13, between the years of the Depression and World War II. "I teach freshman students in a local community college one day a week. I used to teach full-time, but now I have too many deadlines to meet. At the moment I'm teaching Jewish-American literature of the twentieth century. Writing is so quiet; I need to teach to get me but of the house arid talking," she added with a grin.

Elizabeth Mansfield's happiest girlhood hours were spent sitting out on a fire escape in the Bronx, eating apples and reading. "I had to practice the piano an hour a day, but I kept a book in the piano bench in case my mother stepped out of the apartment."

She majored in English literature at Hunter. "But," she confessed, with a shake of her blonde curls (all Regency heroines have curls, you see!), "I guess those early romances remained in my blood even though I believed I'd grown out of them."

Elizabeth married a metallurgical engineer and had two children, a boy and a girl. She taught English in the New York high schools as they were growing up. "Then I went into college teaching," she explained, "where the hours are somewhat shorter and more adaptable to the demands of motherhood. All during those years—since childhood, in fact—I dreamed of being a writer. I used to write movie and theater reviews for local papers, angry letters to editors, and jingles and limericks for contests. Then, one semester, when I was teaching Anna Karenina to a class at NYU, I had a sudden, gut-level, born-again realization of the depth and magnitude of Tolstoy's genius and knew with a terrible certainty that I was no Tolstoy. I gave up hope of being a writer."

It was several years before it dawned on her—so great was her awe of the superb writers whose works she taught—that not everyone who writes is a Tolstoy. "Slowly," she recalled, "I began to notice how many of the current books being published were less than marvelous. I began to whisper to myself, 'I can do better than this!' By this time, my husband had transferred to Washington, D.C. (as part of the Corps of Engineers) and we were living in Virginia. I was teaching at Dunbarton College. When the college failed financially and closed its doors, I decided to try my hand at writing before looking for another teaching position. In 1975, when Georgette Heyer died, I won a prize for an article I had written about her work. An editor friend who read the article suggested that I try writing her sort of book myself. I did. I am now working on my tenth Regency and enjoying every minute. Incidentally," she added, "both my children are good writers and, in the true American style, will no doubt surpass their mother before long!"

Was it luck or fate or just a great appreciation for Georgette Heyer that led her to competing for a prize? "It started with a prize," said Elizabeth, "The Irene Leache Memorial Award for Best Essay. Heyer had died the year before, and I noticed that she was given just a couple of paragraphs on the bottom of The New York Times' obituary page. I realized that the editor just didn't know who she was; if he had, he would have given her front-page attention. After all, many thousands of American women were faithful readers of her books. As a result I called my essay The Last Secret Vice. It was about romance fiction in general and Heyer in particular. When I won the competition-a college president who was as dignified, intellectual and unromantic as it is possible to be-said that the essay made him wish, for the first time in his life, to read a romance. -If an essay can do that,' he said, 'it deserves an award.'"

Flushed with pride, and with the helpful friend's suggestion to "try a Regency novel too," an idea for a Regency began buzzing around in Elizabeth's head. "Writing it was the most fun I had ever had in my entire writing career. But the editor " she went on, "thought it was too-tame.'I didn't think it was but I took his word for it and sat down and wrote another, hoping that the second would be more exciting. Without telling me my friend submitted both manuscripts to an agent in New York Two weeks later, my phone rang. It was the agent, telling me she'd sold both manuscripts in one week. I then adopted the nom-de-plume of Elizabeth Mansfield, a more beautiful sounding name than my own.

"Selling a first book is one of life's great moments for a writer. Selling two was almost too much to bear-I walked several feet off the floor for weeks afterward. And, to tell the truth though it is now ten books later, I am still slightly tinged with the afterglow," she admitted.

She wrote a saga of a Jewish family and a musical version of Jane Austen's novel. Persuasion. And she was always looking for Regency antiques to add to her collection; along with fashion prints of the period on the wall of her study, she had acquired a clock which was made in 1815. "It bongs while I work," she admitted laughingly.

Would she have enjoyed living during the Regency? "I don't think so," she remarked. "I probably would have been a member of the lower classes, and they had dreadful lives!"

Paula Schwartz, who wrote under the pseudonym Elizabeth Mansfield, died from ovarian cancer on December 21, 2003 at 2:20 PM, at home, surrounded by family members. It was her wish that the online community not be informed of her illness until after her passing.

First Book - A Christmas Kiss (1978): A Christmas Kiss and Winter Wonderland (Signet Regency Romance)

Last Book - An Encounter with Venus (2003): An Encounter With Venus (Signet Regency Romance)

Source: Love's Leading Ladies