The Agonized Confession of Miranda Neville

I awoke in the middle of the night screaming. The Trial of Queen Caroline was in the summer! 

That seminal event of 1820 may have given some people nightmares: the peers who had to spend August listening to scurrilous testimony in the stuffy Lords chamber, instead of relaxing on their country estates. But why did I care? Why did I rush with trembling hands to my history books praying that I’d remembered the date wrong, or the date in my book was wrong, or somebody else was wrong.

The Trial of Queen Caroline by Sir George Hayter. All my characters missed it.

Alas, no. I was wrong. The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton is set in summer 1820 and a good part of the action takes place at a very grand political house party. In July/August 1820. When the entire English political establishment was stuck in London.

 How did I come to make such a mistake? I’d written the book, revised the book, gone through copy edits and galleys. And it never occurred to me. Ouch.

To be fair, national events don’t impinge on the plot. The story could equally well have been set a year or two sooner, or later. The opening bears the date 1820 because it follows on from two books in the same series, the first of which was set in 1819 for a reason I cannot now remember.

I passed from shock to resentment. Why do we have to put dates in our books anyway? Jane Austen didn’t. Georgette Heyer didn’t. Unless one includes a real event, like the Battle of Waterloo, the exact year doesn’t matter.

I was already working on the next book which has a political setting. Looking at the events of that year I came up with “the great cabinet reshuffle of 1822,” not words to thrill anyone but the most dedicated political history geek. Also, I’d invented a family (loosely based on the dukes of Portland) at the very center of English politics. So I decided to liberate myself from the day to day reality of history and select a few broad themes around which to weave my romance. I didn’t even name the family's political party, though the savvy reader will spot them for Whigs. 

In Anthony Trollope I have an illustrious example. His novels feature a couple of politicians whom contemporary readers certainly identified as Disraeli and Gladstone. No, the Duke of Omnium was never Prime Minister. Heck, Trollope even invented the entire county of Barsetshire.

I’m thinking of omitting dates from future books. Meanwhile, my mistake really irks me.

P.S. The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton was published over three months ago and not a single person has pointed out my mistake.

A Mini Excerpt from The Amorous Education

Publication day of The Amorous Education of Celia Seaton is still four months away. I can't even reveal the cover yet, though it's coming soon. But just for fun I decided to post a mini-excerpt.

*****

The door to the humble structure was blocked by a body. The body of a man lying unconscious, wearing nothing but breeches and a pair of riding boots. It had been some years since Celia had seen the bare torso of a grown man, and never a white man. He was pale, as befit a man who was always dressed up to his neck, but the smattering of dark hair, covering the chest and descending in a vee over his flat stomach, didn’t disguise the fact that the skin covered well-formed muscles. This interesting masculine form distracted her only a few seconds from the astonishing fact that she knew him.

And although he was one of several men who had bedeviled her life, she did not actually wish him dead.

Kneeling on the ground she set her fingers to his temple and found a pulse. “Mr. Compton,” she said. “Mr. Compton, wake up. Are you well?”

Nothing. She rested her head on his chest. Judging by the strength of his heartbeat, Mr. Tarquin Compton would live to cause further distress to awkward arrivals on the London marriage mart. She supposed she’d better try to revive him. And much as she detested the creature, she was curious to discover why the ton’s most fashionable gentleman lay half-naked next to a deserted Yorkshire cottage.

Tarquin's Book has a Title

Tarquin Compton, the tall dark dandy with a taste for rare poetry and pornography, is the hero of my third Burgundy Club book. I can now reveal that the title of the book. THE AMOROUS EDUCATION OF CELIA SEATON will be published in August 2011. (Pre-order now from Amazon)

You may find the book listed around the web as How to Marry a Governess, but that was a placeholder while discussions went on with my publisher. I'm over the moon about The Amorous Education - it's really descriptive and not at all generic. By the way Celia is a governess so the placeholder wasn't inaccurate either. (I don't think it's a spoiler to let on that Tarquin and Celia get married in the end).

Settling on a title is quite a business, with all sorts of factors being considered, mostly relating to sales potential. My editor and I typically come up with dozens of ideas, most of them pretty terrible and many very silly. My all time favorite stupid title was a chick lit idea for NEVER RESIST TEMPTATION: Baking and Boinking - the sexy tale of a pastry chef and her bad boy British lord.

Hm. I kind of like it. Maybe we could do a reissue?