Exclusive Extras
Inside A Wild Pursuit
Warning! In describing relations between characters, I may wreck a book for you by making it clear who someone marries, or the outcome of a book. Please do not read about The Inside Take if you're wary of knowing who is paired with whom!
- Sebastian’s mother originally began as a truly tough, nasty character (I wrote Sebastian’s visit with his mother, now Chapter Six, first). But I’m not much good at writing truly villainous types – and how did Sebastian become so great if his mother was a true horror? – so before I noticed it, she wiggled her way into the book and I grew fond of her.
- One of the most fraught decisions in writing this book had to do with Esme’s baby. On one side, I wanted sweet William to be Miles’s baby, because Miles wanted a son so much. And I knew that Sebastian would love William with precisely the same passion as he would have loved a son of his own blood. So everything was set, and I was typing along… and suddenly a little birthmark appeared on William’s back. There are, by the way, literary antecedents for this sort of thing: in Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus returns home after years and years, and his nurse recognizes him by his birthmark. So there you go… me and Homer.
Stephen Fairfax-Lacy, of course, first appears as a character in Duchess in Love.- To my utter surprise, a reader pointed out that my hero, Stephen Fairfax-Lacy, borrowed his last name from one of my favorite novelists, Georgette Heyer. In The Grand Sophy (one of my favorites!), the heroine’s name is Sophy Fairfax-Lacy. I can only say that it was an unconscious tribute to one of my favorite novels of all time.
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