Wild Women ~

Hi Sandy! Thank you so much for inviting me to blog. April 2007 is a really big deal for me as my first book hits the stands. Claiming the Courtesan is a dark, intense Regency historical that charts the stormy relationship between London’s most notorious courtesan, Soraya, and her passionate, tormented lover, the Duke of Kylemore.

Which brings me to a burning question: Voulez-vous coucher avec moi ce soir?

Ooh, you can’t imagine the naughty thrill singing that line gave a bunch of schoolgirls in the ‘70s (yes, unfortunately, I am THAT old!). For a moment, we weren’t spotty teenagers trapped in a very dull Aussie girls’ boarding school. We weren’t wearing unflattering black serge tunics with box pleats (which on a plump shorty like me really wasn’t a good look!).

No! We were glamorous French-speaking courtesans sashaying around New Orleans exercizing our hypnotic power over any man we cared to cast an eye upon.

Whoo-ee. Pretty heady stuff! We were all Lady Marmalade (which has always struck me as a strange name – I mean, marmalade is sour, lumpy orange jam!).

I’m not sure if that’s where my fascination with courtesans began. It could actually have been history class. I LOVED history but what really interested me was the stuff they didn’t put into textbooks. I loved details about private lives. I wanted to know about love and sex and daily things like what they wore and ate and did in their spare time. To me, that’s where you get the sense of what life was like in the 16th or the 19th century. Wars and politics and all that guy stuff was OK. But I wanted to know about what the girls got up to. And often that meant illicit liaisons. My commitment to the causes of the French Revolution was fairly shaky. My interest in what happened when Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI finally had sex (a long time after their wedding!) was much stronger! And then I couldn’t help wondering what it had been like. Not much fun for her, I suspect!

So move forward many years and my debut book is coming out with Avon. What’s it about? A COURTESAN! Those early thoughts had obviously been stewing away at the back of my mind all that time.

I’d written a couple of stories about women in high society with money and influence and people to look after them. Then I asked myself what if that wasn’t you. For most women, life was tough in the Regency. Legal rights were thin on the ground as were career opportunities outside marriage. What if you were young and poor and had no family to turn to? What if a younger brother and sister relied on your capacity to earn a living? What if you were beautiful enough to stop traffic and your attempts to find honest work came to nothing because powerful men wouldn’t take no for an answer? It was out of such musings that my heroine Soraya/Verity Ashton, the reluctant courtesan, was born.

Who’s the most unusual heroine you’ve ever read about? My favorite comment wins a signed copy of Claiming the Courtesan and some Aussie chocolate. Because let’s face it, chocolate goes with a luscious romance, doesn’t it? Happy reading!