Ten Best Historical Romances of 2001 from Amazon.
Bookcode: enchanting
Enchanting: Reader’s Choice Award
National Reader’s Choice Awards Best Long Historical of 2001.
Enchanting: RITA
Finalist for a RITA, the romance industry’s top award.
Inside Enchanting Pleasures
- The Pleasures Trilogy should be read in this order: Potent Pleasures, Midnight Pleasures, Enchanting Pleasures.
- Update from 2014: A neurologist (and reader) named Nancy wrote me with some fascinating information that explains the footnote in Dr. Oliver Sacks’s book regarding sex and migraines, which inspired Quill’s dilemma. Apparently, it is an orgasm that triggers headaches in coital and postcoital migraines. Orgasm is associated with a sudden change in blood pressure and the caliber of blood vessels, causing a migraine to be triggered in some individuals. These days the problem is solved with a beta blocker (blood pressure medicine).
- My editor during this book, the enchanting Jackie Cantor of Bantam Dell, suffers from migraines. Writers take their ideas from everywhere: Quill’s ailment was a combination of my wish that a scientist would discover a real cure for migraines, and an article in The New Yorker that talked of African tree frogs and the possible pain relief contained in their venom.
- In some ways, Enchanting Pleasures really is my first book. The plots of the first two in this trilogy leapt to mind with the help of research I’d done for my doctorate in early modern drama (check the historical notes in the back of Potent and Midnight for my sources). But the frolicking, silly, utterly improbable plot of Enchanting Pleasures is all my own. I did a lot of research on the East India Company. I want to add that I took the names of the villians in this book from the index of a history book on EIC and heard from some of their descendants who said, indignantly, that their ancestors were worthy, responsible members of society who wouldn’t dream of kidnapping a prince. My apologies to them!
- Along the same lines, Alexander (and his twin Patrick) were modeled to some extent on my husband Alessandro (who has silver-shot hair), but Quill came into being all on his own.
- When Gabby’s dress falls to her waist, it reflects my firmly held belief that those Regency dresses look as if they’d be very hard to keep up — I mean the ones that never properly hit the shoulders at all, but drape themselves somewhere around the bosom. Plus, I was so shocked by the heartbreak I ended up writing about in Midnight that I kept telling myself: farce! Write farce!