My Love, My Enemy: The War of 1812 through the Lens of WWII

I recently finished Jan Cox Speas' classic novel My Love, My Enemy. Set during the War of 1812, it has several plot elements in common with The Windflower. Both novels feature a naïve 18-year-old American heroine who becomes entangled with an aristocratic British spy and becomes a pampered prisoner aboard a privateer's ship, where she befriends the captain and crew.

The two books are very different, however. The Windflower is a 1980s genre romance of the bodice-ripper era, filled with graphic (if occasionally unrealistic) sensuality. My Love, My Enemy is much more like a traditional regency romance, with only a few kisses and hints of thoroughly-repressed passion. It violates other romance genre expectations as well. The hero and heroine are apart for much of the time. The heroine receives her first kiss not from the hero, but from a rival for his affections. In fact, I found myself wondering which man she was really going to choose toward the end. I wonder if the author had a first draft somewhere with a different ending (like the original cut of the movie Pretty in Pink, where Darcy ended up with Ducky rather than Blaine).

Jan Cox Speas obviously did her research for My Love, My Enemy. The big events of the war are accurately portrayed. The antagonism between the Americans and British however, is continually undermined by the text. Although the story is mostly told through the point of view of American Page Bradley, Speas repeatedly tells us of the discipline and effectiveness of the British soldiers fighting in the peninsula under Wellington. American privateer Daniel Mason (who rather reminds me of Han Solo) takes Lord Hazard prisoner but comes to like and respect him very much, even though they are not only enemies in war but also rivals in love. The New Englanders dislike the British but distrust the French more, and many think the Madison administration chose the wrong side in the Napoleonic wars.

This grudging respect for the British and distrust of the French in an American novel about the War of 1812 makes a lot more sense when you realize it was written in 1961, by an author who came of age during World War II. Page Bradley's experiences and impressions during her globe-trotting misadventures would have held special resonance for readers who lived through another trans-Atlantic war.

The account of the privateer ship Caprice harassing a convoy and picking off merchantman one by one while their inadequate British navy escort looked on helplessly immediately reminded me of my grandfather's stories about a disastrous North Atlantic convoy that was destroyed by the Germans in July of 1942 after the British Admiralty ordered the military ships to scatter.

When Page and her chaperone are left at the house of an elderly Breton woman until the men's immediate wartime duties are discharged and safe passage can be arranged, the account of her wait is poignant and realistic. They are a house full of women awaiting the return of a British officer and an American sailor. Marie-Therese, the village girl who cooks for the household, laments that she will never marry, for Napoleon has conscripted all of the local men, and most of them will never come home. Fortunately for her, she ends up going to America as the bride of an American sailor, like a great many Frenchwomen did in the 1940s.

There is also a moving description of the English countryside, in which Page observes that the people there never experienced the harsh realities of the war. Their fields and hedgerows were undamaged, and they had plenty to eat. In this particular section, England stands in for America. While the Napoleonic wars were fought entirely outside of England, World War II was not. British cities were heavily damaged during the Blitz, and British civilians suffered hardships that Americans (outside of Hawaii) never knew.

Speas' characters discuss the relative strengths of the British and American navies in a way that foreshadows the eventual shift of superpower status from the former to the latter. That shift finally occurred during World War II. At the beginning of the war, Britannia still ruled the seas. By the end, American shipbuilding capacity (much of it located in the mid-Atlantic states where Speas lived and set her novel) allowed the USA to rule its own worldwide empire.

Re-Reading The Windflower Part III: the Forgotten Conflict

(In honor of Read-a-Romance Month, I am re-reading my all-time favorite romance novel, The Windflower and remarking on how my perceptions of the book differ this time around).

The novel opens in 1813 Virginia and rather quickly references the ongoing war against the British (which naïve patriot Merry calls The Second War for American Independence). The heroine's brother and father are directly involved in the war effort and her brother occasionally involves her in a bit of espionage on behalf of her country.

The Windflower can be classified as a Regency-set historical romance (since it takes place during the Regency and its hero is a British aristocrat). I did not realize in 1984 how unusual it was for such a book to deal with the War of 1812 in a substantial way. It is usually seen as a sideshow of the Napoleonic Wars (which, from the British point of view, it rather was).

Very few Americans know much about it; most believe that it was an aggressive attempt by the British to re-take her former American colonies, and that the British lost (as documented in Johnny Horton's classic pop tune "the Battle of New Orleans").  In reality, it was part trade war, part labor dispute (over the shortage of able-bodied seamen) and part land war between the U.S. and Canada.  Both sides sustained a great deal of damage, and in the end everyone agreed to return to the status quo antebellum.

There are many reasons why the average American school textbook presents such an oversimplified (to the point of being misleading) version of the War of 1812, and they all have to do with cultural propaganda. As a nation, we are uncomfortable talking about the wars that did not end in glory for the American military and new territory for the United States. Also, during the first half of the 20th century, Britain was an important ally during both world wars, helping to strengthen the "special relationship" between our two nations. We did not care to dwell on the spats early in that relationship.

In the 1990s, I read a book by Donald R. Hickey called The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict.  I found it to be fascinating.  When I started re-reading The Windflower, I wondered if the war would be portrayed superficially and/or inaccurately.  Much to my surprise, the historical references seem pretty accurate (given that 20 years has elapsed since I read that scholarly tome about the war).  Characters hear news about actual battles.  Merry's brother eagerly declares that, if the coming campaign in Canada is successful, the British will soon be driven out of North America (taking Canada from the British was a major motivation for the American war hawks to pursue the war in the first place). The New York merchants grumble about the ruinously expensive war disrupting trade. Devon muses about the poor decisions by the Madison administration.

I have read a great many historical romances that really skimped on the historical research.  The Windflower isn't one of them.