Like many women who grew up in the 70s, and who enjoyed reading, I loved Georgette Heyer as a girl. I bought Black Moth, when I was about 12, and loved it, and then for the rest of my teens I was always reading and re reading her works. And I began to toy with the idea of writing a “Heyer type” story myself. In the late 70s, after Heyer died, a few other authors were put forward as writing “In the style of Georgette Heyer” –. Usually they were very much inferior, but they were similar in types of plots and characters. They weren’t “sexy”. And as time passed, Regency romance novels did become a lot more sexualised. I didn’t mind the earlier “imitations” which had sex in them... it’s a part of life; it is an important part of love and marriage. I don’t mind reading or writing about it. But gradually they just got to be little more than sex scenes and silly badly written plots and idiotic characters, not to mention they were wildly inaccurate in an historical sense. So when I finally decided to try and write a “regency romance”, I wanted to make it a bit more accurate and to do something different to the hundreds of regencies that were out there. So I decided to set it on the other side of the English Channel and write a “Napoleonic Romance.” Napoleon’s court was a bit livelier than the British one, which was staid and rigidly moral. So I thought it would be easier to have a light-hearted atmosphere and some glamour, if I set the romance at court with one of Josephine’s ladies as the heroine. Corisande is a “lectrice” or reader, whom the royal ladies employed to read books to her, and to do other odd jobs... and keep her company. I’ve always liked the Empress Josephine, and I liked the idea of using her as a character in my story. Napoleon is less likable, now that I’m old enough to be aware of his many faults, but I still admire him as a soldier and administrator of genius. another useful thing about setting the story in Napoleonic France was that this empire stretched across Europe and so there were people from different countries, and I was able to have a couple who knew little of each other’s backgrounds. Corisande was a French bourgeoise, with some aristocratic relations. Sebastian was a baron form one of the small German states. He was stiff, and militaristic, very much a man’s man, and she was light hearted and frivolous, enjoying court life and feminine occupations. When Napoleon suggests that Sebastian gets himself married, because of an indiscretion, the baron is attracted to Corisande; because she is pretty, but is not sure he wants to marry a flighty young girl.
End of Part I
