The Official Essex Sisters Companion Guide (5 page)

It takes me around eight months or so to actually write a book. I work out the emotional dramas myself, but when it comes to historical detail, I get tremendous help from my research assistant, Franzeca Drouin. I managed to find some old e-mails that we exchanged while I was writing the series; they give a peek into the interaction between an author and her researcher. I talked in the section above about my characters needing to “perform” the part of a lady; one of the crucial aspects of polite society was an excellent command of etiquette. I can handle table manners, but I need Franzeca when it comes to aristocratic titles.

Franzeca

We had a fairly lengthy exchange about the use of titles in the books, which I thought you might enjoy. You can see my responses following Franzeca’s commentary. And notice the book title that she refers to—
Something Wanton
? At some point, that title was nixed and replaced with
Much Ado About You
. Another interesting point is that Rafe started out “middle-aged” before I changed my mind and turned him into a possible husband for one of the sisters. On one level, this should be a simple discussion, but it isn’t. In Regency England, one’s title and rank determined the course of one’s life, and I can spend hours and hours figuring out precisely which title to give a character.

As well as guiding me in points of etiquette, Franzeca is the source of much of the historical detail in my books. For this series, we exchanged many, many e-mails about horse racing. Those letters cover everything from the way horses are described (according to Franzeca, the famous Secretariat was “nosy, alert, ambitious, playful, a big clown, and unruffled around crowds”) to their height and weight (Secretariat was sixteen hands, two inches high and weighed twelve hundred pounds). Some of her e-mails
include information about horses written in the 1800s, so that I can strike the right note when my characters describe horses, and some of the letters take a broader historical perspective. She noted, for example, that racehorses were gradually getting bigger, and fifteen hands was a good size by 1818.

In a specific example, Franzeca sent me tremendous amounts of information about a stallion named Blacklock, born in 1814. Here’s Franzeca writing about him: “I like that he was big and not pretty and that Ewan got a bargain for him, though it’s hard to think of Annabel’s father letting a colt go so cheaply. Another bad decision by the viscount. I guess it would be better if Ewan bought Blacklock in 1815 as a yearling, which would be the year Annabel’s father died.”

One thing that nonwriters often don’t realize is the amount of work that can lie behind even a single sentence in a historical novel. For example, Franzeca and I exchanged a lot of e-mails about the Jockey Club, which was founded in 1751 and began regulating the horse racing industry in 1757. I had the idea of using it in reference to Draven’s ill-fated choice to race a yearling, but eventually the entire thing fell out of the book.

Mostly Franzeca puts me straight about history, but every once in a while I manage to score a point against her. For example, we had long discussions about Draven’s rash decision to race his yearling. Franzeca protested that yearlings were not put to race, but I had found evidence to the contrary (ha!). Here’s Franzeca’s note: “You were right: this is from the late 1700s: There were isolated instances of racing yearlings, but happily the pursuit of precocity to this outrageous length did not become general and was soon suppressed.” And Franzeca added a little note: “Bad Draven!”

As well as keeping me to the historical straight and narrow, Franzeca also steps out of the realm of history to play a more editorial/critique partner role, using her historical knowledge to create a coherent backstory for my characters. In one e-mail, for example, she writes, “Mayne’s mother was French, so he used to give the horses French names. That tradition continued as well, making sense to give French names to horses with French-named parents. So these are: Tournesol (Sunflower); Perigord, Millefleur . . .” You can see how well Franzeca knows the book; she figures out backstory herself and then tells me about it.

Eloisa and Franzeca

I asked her to come up with a back story for Mayne’s fiancée, Sylvie. While no mention of Sylvie’s past made it into the final draft of
Pleasure for Pleasure
, her quiet but ferocious put-down of Mayne when he asks whether she is “happy” stems directly from the background Franzeca created for her.

                       
Sylvie de la Broderie has a most interesting family background. Basically, her grandfather was beloved by his people, and the villagers actually defended him from the mob. So Sylvie’s young father was drawn to Napoleon and Paris, and became Napoleon’s finance minister. But he grew increasingly dismayed by the carnage and corruption of the new regime, and so he wisely began moving his holdings to England. During the Peace of Amiens (1802–1803), he fled safely to England. Sylvie thus moved from Paris to England at age ten.

Jody and I thought it might be fun if Franzeca offered an idea to all of you out there thinking about writing a Regency romance. Why not write something about a fabulous
female
jockey from the period? You’ll find her essay at the end of
Part One
. I think we’d all agree that a female jockey would make a terrific heroine!

My editor for the Essex Sisters series and I often figured out tricky aspects of a plot before she saw a first draft. For example, I had difficulty figuring out how to handle Rafe’s alcoholism in
The Taming of the Duke
. The problem, of course, is that back in the 1800s, people didn’t think of alcoholism as an illness, the way they do now. It was hard not to fall into modern patterns of speaking. But I found a letter to my editor, saying that I had just finished reading John London’s
Jack Barleycorn: Alcoholic Memoirs
, dated 1913. That is a century after the date of my book, but even so, it was invaluable because London talked about addiction to alcohol without medicalizing it (as I did above by calling it an “addiction”!).

When I finished a first draft of each manuscript, I printed it out and mailed it in (that’s how long ago the Essex Sisters were published!). Larger editorial suggestions would happen over the phone; in my experience, if an editor is going to tell an author to cut more than three chapters, she generally does it in person. Line edits were handled by e-mail. I managed to find a few snippets, so you get a glimpse of what those exchanges are like.

You can see that I almost always agreed with her suggestions. Obviously, it’s harder when one’s editor feels strongly that a book has gone in the wrong direction, as happened with
Kiss Me, Annabel
. Sometimes it’s simply necessary. An author has trouble seeing her own text clearly, especially because in her own revision process she ends up reading pages several hundred times.

I managed to find some cut snippets from
Much Ado About You
. From this vantage point, I don’t know why they were cut. This passage must have come in the very beginning, when Tess and her sisters are thinking about their new guardian before they’ve met him.

                       
Their father had left them to a duke of whom they knew nothing, other than the fact that his name appeared regularly in
The Sporting Magazine
. They had found a mention of him in the
Annals of Sporting
too, and deduced from an ancient copy of
Debrett’s
that he was thirty-six and his name was Raphael Jourdain, Duke of Holbrook. In all, one could sum it up as: Holbrook liked his horseflesh enough so that he had taken all four of them in trade for a horse. Of course, Starling
was
one of her papa’s best horses.

                            
Tess was the eldest, and sometimes it felt as if she’d spent her whole life worrying over her sisters. But in the past few months, while Papa lingered near death, and then in the months it took to bury him, and organize the estate, and hand it over to their cousin . . . well, she’d worried more than ever before in her life. What if the duke turned them into scullery maids? Or worse? Who could stop him from that?

                            
All the way in the carriage from Scotland, she kept thinking dismally of the muddy, sweating troupes of gentlemen who made their way into the parlor every hunt day, eyeing the four of them in a way that made her feel both beautiful and discomforted. Those men talked endlessly of bits of blood and neck-or-nothing drivers, and all the time they stared at the four of them, up and down, from their chins to their knees. The Englishmen were the worst, or so it seemed to her: incompetent riders with leering eyes. Draven Maitland, Imogen’s adored beau, was a good example: a feckless wild—wild
thing
, just as her Papa had said.

                            
What would such a man be like as the guardian of four girls? Would he bring them out? Find them husbands even though they had no dowries? Would he understand about chaperones, and reputations, and the importance of wearing the right clothing?

                            
When they finally arrived at their destination, there was no outward sign that Holbrook Court was occupied by a duke mad enough about horses to trade the care of four young women for a thoroughbred mare. It was a huge old rambling pile of a manor, probably built in the days of Queen Elizabeth, to Tess’s untutored eye.

                            
One thing she noticed immediately was that the mansion was glowing with light. Virtually every window was blazing. That had to mean that the duke’s purse was made of a finer silk than their papa’s. Lord knows, when the races were going badly, there’d been plenty a night when they’d eaten their evening meal by the light of bulrushes.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, my editor and I really only had a disagreement about the last nineteen chapters of
Kiss Me, Annabel
. I was pretty early in my career in those days, and I didn’t fight very hard for my own story, which I regret now. I still remember getting the phone call, which sent me into a tailspin of despair. My editor had problems with the second half. In fact, she didn’t like where the novel was going at all—and the change she requested needed an entirely different focus and a new plot.

I gnashed my teeth and cried and ate a lot of chocolate, but finally I sat down and rewrote the book. I do love the book as it was published. I’m offering the alternate ending with the proviso that it exists only in an unedited manuscript. The pages you’ll find in the Appendix are my very first draft and first thoughts.

Please do not, under any circumstances, read those pages before you read
Kiss Me, Annabel
.

Copyediting a Manuscript

So now we’re at the point in a book’s life when it goes to the copy editor. As it happens, I was able to find the copy editor’s queries. This particular copy editor put a long note on the front.

I recognize this is a well-written book, and the changes I made were not done routinely, but with an eye toward improving a solid manuscript. I hope Eloisa takes my changes in that spirit. I have divided them into categories.

His categories were all rather arcane. A few times he didn’t like my use of an “implied point of view,” which is when a character refers to herself. He had quite a bit to say about the rhythm of dialogue, as in: “if this rhythm were breached by having the same character in successive paragraphs that might momentarily puzzle the reader and/or force them to double back.”

I am almost always grateful to copy editors. Their sharp eyes for grammar and spelling make novels legible. I can edit and edit and look straight past an obvious typo. I feel this even more strongly now that self-published books are such a strong part of the market; I have read wonderful stories that were marred by grammar problems. Some copy editors do go over the top, and I think the question of whether the rhythm of dialogue is “breached” is a bridge too far.