A tea expert named Lois wrote with a fascinating note about the history of tea. Midnight Pleasures mentions Patrick’s “man in Ceylon” in reference to black tea. However, tea was first planted in Ceylon as an experiment in 1841, as a result of the Opium Wars. England was looking for places outside China to cultivate tea, and they chose Ceylon and Assam in India. Even as late as 1867 there was very little tea grown in Ceylon, only 1000 acres. At the time of Midnight Pleasures all the tea consumed in England came from China and was mostly green tea.
Bookcode: midnight
Midnight: Affaire de Coeur
Best Regency of 2000 from Affaire de Coeur.
Midnight: USA Today bestseller
#136 on the USA Today bestseller list.
Midnight: RITA
Finalist for a RITA, the romance industry’s top award.
Midnight: People Magazine
People magazine’s Page Turner of the Week.
Inside Midnight Pleasures
- The Pleasures Trilogy should be read in this order: Potent Pleasures, Midnight Pleasures, Enchanting Pleasures.
- Sophie came out of my conviction that Regency misses were not all that missish (if so, there wouldn’t have been a nearly 40% pregnancy rate upon marriage during the period, which there was). So Sophie is a regency Bad Girl! as the song goes.
Sophie’s story began in Potent Pleasures. That was because I was tired of reading romances in which the heroine never seemed to have a girlfriend. Why not? I couldn’t survive without my friends!- There’s a story behind Sophie’s mother, Eloise, as well. When I wrote a first draft of this book, Eloise was a very small character, and the friction between her and her husband was merely an amusing aside. But my editor at that time had lost her mother as a young girl, and she kept asking me for more about Eloise, and more about Eloise… Before I knew it, Eloise had become a very interesting character in her own right, and her marriage a major subplot. I have received many letters from readers about Eloise; I owe thanks for each to the wonderful Jackie Cantor, Executive Vice President at Bantam/Dell.
- Of all my books, the events in Midnight Pleasures are most closely tied to those in my own life.
Mea Culpa, Midnight Pleasures
- Do you know what the bugbear of historical novelists is? Titles! Lord Pillypettle and Lady Sillytrisket, the Duke of Coddswillow and the Marquess of Biddle, or is it Marquess Biddle? Or should he be known by his proper name, Lord Jinglebutt? Those pesky things are impossible to understand and I constantly get them wrong. Constantly! Don’t even ask what went wrong in Midnight Pleasures… after I received a small flood of irate letters, I hired an expert to read my novels before they go into page proofs and pay particular attention to titles.
- Reyanna wrote to point out that in Chapter Eight Patrick strikes a match. Argh. No matches were around to be “struck” until the late 1820s. I’m afraid there are probably many little errors like these in my early books (Midnight Pleasures was only my second). I’ve learned a lot about history in the process of writing twenty-some historical novels.
- A tea expert named Lois wrote with a fascinating note about the history of tea. Midnight Pleasures mentions Patrick’s “man in Ceylon” in reference to black tea. However, tea was first planted in Ceylon as an experiment in 1841, as a result of the Opium Wars. England was looking for places outside China to cultivate tea, and they chose Ceylon and Assam in India. Even as late as 1867 there was very little tea grown in Ceylon, only 1000 acres. At the time of Midnight Pleasures all the tea consumed in England came from China and was mostly green tea.