strange and random happenstance: H.G. Parry

Unlike some of the other authors featured during Regency Magic I didn't have a serendipitous series of events that led to me discovering H.G. Parry. Instead it was fairly straightforward if you're a book blogger. So NetGalley is a website that lets "book advocates," such as reviewers and bloggers, request digital galleys of upcoming publications. My morning routine every day is to check my email and then check NetGalley. Because you never really know what's going to show up when and one of the reasons I started my blog was to get books by my favorite authors before anyone else. Small goal, but it was achieved. One day in 2019 I was looking through the new titles and one caught my eye, The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heap. The description sounded very Ffordian so I hit request and according to my records on June 12th, 2019 I was approved. I mean who doesn't want to read a book with more than one Mr. Darcy? Though it was a book published a year later by H.G. Parry, A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians, that was even more up my alley. Because it was "technically" Regency Magic. I say technically because it's more Regency adjacent as H.G. pointed out to me in our recent email exchange. But I will counter that they do have a Regency crisis, it's just averted for the moment, and everything that's happening feeds into the Regency. And of course, because I wanted to read this book more than anything I was denied. There was some weeping and wailing but I recovered and they did approve me for the sequel, A Radical Act of Free Magic, so that was some cold comfort. But the thing that is so interesting to me is that H.G.'s writing, especially in her Shadow Histories, is so densely Dickensian and Uriah Heep is Dickens's creation. I just feel that H.G. really knows what she's doing. Her writing is so put together and thorough. Plus she's cranking out doorstop sized books at the rate of one a year, which, well, my hat is off to her. And now that my hat is off, let me cordially welcome her to my blog.

Question: When did you first discover Jane Austen?

Answer: It was Northanger Abbey at my first year of university. I'd never studied her in high school and I think I was expecting something romantic, so I was knocked sideways by how absurdly funny and clever it was. That opening paragraph is still one of the wittiest I've ever read.

Question: What do you think Jane Austen would think of her impact with so many literary offshoots, from parody to pastiche?

Answer: Oh, I think she'd love it! And also mock most of them mercilessly! But her first published book was gloriously intertextual and had great fun with The Mysteries of Udolpho, so she'd get it.

Question: Where do you get your inspiration from?

Answer: Usually, from reading history and famous novels, and then seeing what happens if certain kinds of magic is added - what can it be used to illuminate, or explore, or cast in a different light? I love books that are in conversation with other books.

Question: What makes the early 19th century mesh so well with magic?

Answer: I'm not sure I can answer this: the Shadow Histories are mostly the Revolutionary Wars, so I barely got to the 19th century. I think in general though there's a really interesting overlap between historical fiction and fantasy because there's an equally interesting overlap between the way we think about history and the way we think about secondary world fantasy - both take place in worlds that are in some ways very similar and in others very different to our own. Magic gives us a way of exploring history at a remove, as it does the present day. And the turn of the 19th century was a fascinating and dramatic time, where so many choices were being made that shaped our present day for better or worse.

Question: The world building and system of magic varies greatly in the regency fantasy genre, how did you go about creating yours?

Answer: In the Shadow Histories, magic is innate in certain people, but the right to use it is jealously guarded by the aristocracy - so when the tide begins to turn toward revolution, magic is a right that is being fought for along with other freedoms. I wanted it to be a way of thinking about power - who has it, who wields it, what compromises we make to get it, how we use it to fight for a better world, and all those complicated questions that the French Revolution made a matter of life or death.

Question: If you had to choose between writing only period literature or only fantasy literature, which would win?

Answer: I've written fantasy books set in the present day and I've never written historical fiction without magic, so it would have to be fantasy. But I'd find a way to cheat somehow! My contemporary fantasy had five Mr. Darcys, so...

Question: Be honest, have you ever dressed up in Regency clothes just to pretend for a moment you are in the past?

Answer: Ha! I'm definitely better in the present day. The closest I came was at the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, where we were all allowed to try on dresses and shawls and bonnets. I was very excited, but then I just sort of looked like Jemima Puddleduck.

Biography:
H.G. Parry is the author of The Unlikely Escape of Uriah Heep, The Shadow Histories duology, and The Magician's Daughter. Her short fiction has appeared in Intergalactic Medicine Show, Daily Science Fiction, and small press anthologies, and she holds a PhD in English Literature from Victoria University of Wellington. She currently lives in a book-infested flat on the Kāpiti Coast in New Zealand, which she shares with her sister and an increasing menagerie of small animals.

H.G.'s Social Media:
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