Read Wilful Impropriety Online
Authors: Ekaterina Sedia
Tags: #Teen & Young Adult, #Literature & Fiction, #Romance, #Contemporary
Wilful Impropriety
Wilful Impropriety
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Wilful Impropriety
13 Tales of Society, Scandal, and Romance
Edited by Ekaterina Sedia
Constable & Robinson Ltd
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First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2012
Copyright © Ekaterina Sedia, 2012 (unless otherwise stated)
The right of Ekaterina Sedia to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library
UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-348-9 (paperback)
UK ISBN: 978-1-78033-349-6 (ebook)
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First published in the United States in 2012 by Running Press Book Publishers,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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US ISBN: 978-0-7624-4430-4
US Library of Congress Control Number: 2012932639
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Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
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THE UNLADYLIKE EDUCATION OF AGATHA TREMAIN
MRS. BEETON’S BOOK OF MAGICKAL MANAGEMENT
STEEPED IN DEBT TO THE CHIMNEY POTS
COTT
W
ESTERFELD
For the people living through it, the era of Queen Victoria’s rule in Britain was one of constant revolution. Steam power and Marx’s
Capital
gave rise to a new, more antagonistic, relationship between workers and bosses. The discoveries of germ theory and anesthetics brought medicine into its modern form. Networks of gas lines erased night across London, and telegraphs and railways shrunk distances around the globe. Even the novel was transformed, by a notion called “realism”, which posited that a story could carry a reader into another person’s life across barriers of gender, geography, and social station.
Given this maelstrom of change, it’s odd that today we view the Victorian era as a tableau of stuffed shirts, fancy frocks, and good manners. Or perhaps it’s this juxtaposition between decorum and chaos that makes the period so compelling. We imagine of the lord of the manor sipping tea while reading in his morning
Times
that slavery has been abolished, or that Mr. Darwin has forever altered the horizons of religion and natural philosophy. These contrasts make for good drama. After all, the most theatrical place to deploy a flame-thrower is a tea party.
Teenage readers, of course, have a stake in flame-throwing. They’re too young to have been co-opted into the social order, but are old enough to test its limits. They relish discovering how arbitrary social mores can be, and how identity is imposed both from without and within. At the same time, teenagers are exploring how their own bodies work, and all the biological realities that underlie the abundant customs surrounding race, gender, and even clothing.
It’s into this rich stew that this anthology takes us. Many of its young protagonists live inside the systems of Victorian privilege. But as ladies of class, their fortunes aren’t secure without a proper husband in their future. Other stories are about young people whose race, sexuality, or simple poverty leaves them outside of the circles of power, and whose improprieties endanger them every day.
In the Victorian era, behavioral codes were at once stronger and more fragile than they are today, with all the dangers of the magic spells you’ll find within these pages. The wrong word, the wrong hemline, even the wrong flower in a bouquet could result not only in humiliation, but in social banishment and—for the working classes—deadly economic isolation.
So the stakes are high, here in these tales of ancient manners and traditions at war with young bodies and wills. These are stories about revolutions, after all, some as small as a proper dance turn, some as large as the solar system’s movements. But all of them are driven by the human heart, that most potent engine of rebellion.
Scott Westerfeld
KATERINA
S
EDIA
Adult writers and editors enjoy arguing about what makes a book suitable for a young-adult audience. While there are probably as many answers as there are writers (and editors), we can still agree on a few things. Most notably, books for a young-adult audience are by no means restricted in their tropes, but thematically they are more likely to deal with coming of age, identity, and rebellion than books for adults. After all, what other age category is so often defined by defiance?
Recently we saw a great rise in both Victorian and young-adult categories of fiction, and to me these two go hand in hand. If being a teenager is about disobedience, the notion of Victoriana (at least the way it is perceived by a modern reader) is often centered around propriety and convention, rigid social structures, and impermeable class, race, and gender barriers. Yet, where there is convention, there is also defiance, and the opposite side of this Victorian coin is the realization that as long as there are barriers and conventions, there will be those who will rise up against them—suffrage, human rights, notions of equality all find their beginnings in that rigid age.
So it seems to me that the Victorian age is a perfect medium to tell these stories of defying convention, of individuals chafing against the constraints of what was considered to be the unchangeable order of things. Against the expectation that one should know one’s proper place, determined by one’s race, class, and gender, against the notion of marriage and binary gender constructs, against the expectations of strictly heterosexual attraction. These struggles are universal and recognizable, but they take place in the world in which the stakes are very high.
In these pages, you will find stories of young people who manage to wilfully violate the rules. You will also find stories based in reality as well as fantasy. (After all, Victoriana has become a fertile medium for fantastic stories—just look at the latest big-screen iteration of Sherlock Holmes!) But whether the stories are realistic or fantastical, the conflicts are always recognizable, and the tropes will touch a familiar nerve. Be it cross-dressing or dancing or improper use of magic, I hope that the readers will recognize themselves in the protagonists.
In collecting these stories, I was hoping to put together a collection that spoke to modern readers about the eternal themes: love and trespass, betrayal and loyalty, and above all the defiance in the face of disapproving society, and the sacrifices people will make to be true to themselves and to those they love. Because even though the times have changed, there are still restrictions, and there are many improprieties we are willing to commit for love—be it love for ourselves or for others.