Thanks -- ironically enough I have now had reviews on both AO3 and FFnet since posting that lament (again, literally just as I had prepared the file to upload Ch10 to FFnet...) It just took several weeks longer than expected!
Researching French 19th-century maternity wear for the benefit of this chapter was fascinating; there were all sorts of patent support garments that were basically slung underneath the stomach, special corsets, and some fairly ingenious ways of remaining fashionable without drawing too much attention to the figure.
And naturally the classic 'servant problem' in that servants by and large were *not* slavish drones, but people with whom their employers had to cohabit with varying degrees of awkwardness -- Hertha thinks she can go back to her (rose-tinted in retrospect) childhood relationship with her father's household, and of course she finds she can't.
I also had to do a certain amount of research to come up with a suitable subject for the fictional Chalumeau's fictional opera -- it would have to be a grand historical spectacle in the French 19th-century opera tradition, and Marguerite of Navarre (La Reine Margot) seemed a plausibly colourful subject that hadn't actually been done yet!
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2022-10-18 07:51 pm (UTC)Researching French 19th-century maternity wear for the benefit of this chapter was fascinating; there were all sorts of patent support garments that were basically slung underneath the stomach, special corsets, and some fairly ingenious ways of remaining fashionable without drawing too much attention to the figure.
And naturally the classic 'servant problem' in that servants by and large were *not* slavish drones, but people with whom their employers had to cohabit with varying degrees of awkwardness -- Hertha thinks she can go back to her (rose-tinted in retrospect) childhood relationship with her father's household, and of course she finds she can't.
I also had to do a certain amount of research to come up with a suitable subject for the fictional Chalumeau's fictional opera -- it would have to be a grand historical spectacle in the French 19th-century opera tradition, and Marguerite of Navarre (La Reine Margot) seemed a plausibly colourful subject that hadn't actually been done yet!