The Official Essex Sisters Companion Guide

by Eloisa James

  Editor’s Suggestion: Pg 344/345 I think we should perhaps cut from “I feel so responsible . . .” to “. . . simply by allowing her to be angry at you.”, as this section seems very repetitious.

  Eloisa: Sure.

  Editor’s Suggestion: Pg 349 I have changed ass to buttocks here—as this sounds very American.

  Eloisa: Great!

  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.

  When the Manuscript Is Finished

  I would love to be able to reproduce the series of changes that each book cover went through on its journey of a final cover, but that’s impossible as the images are actually copyrighted to the artist. There is a funny story behind The Taming of the Duke’s cover, though. The initial painting—this was before Photoshop was widely used for covers—showed the hero standing with his head bent, stark naked, his hands cupped over his privates. What’s more, this was supposedly a depiction of Rafe—the first hero I’ve ever created who started the series with a bit of a pot belly! The model, on the other hand, had a whopping six-pack.

  I have what’s called “cover approval,” so I nixed that version. I’m a Shakespeare professor; I have to be able to keep my head up in class. The artist then painted a belt and a shirt on him. Well, that was better, but if you look closely at the cover, you’ll see that his head now looks rather small in comparison to his billowing pirate shirt.

  Never mind: we can’t be too fussy, right? There were no belts in the 1800s, but at least it’s clear he’s not naked. But my agent still had a problem with it. She felt that the model’s bent head, together with the title suggesting that he was “tamed,” gave the book an air of being a male/male romance with a BDSM subtext.

  At that point, the artist added that two floating female hands coming over his shoulders. Better—but the right hand, in particular, seemed large in relation to his head. So the painting went back yet another time (I can just imagine the painter’s frustration at this point), and a large red jewel was added to her finger, signaling that she was female.

  My dear friend Teresa Medeiros gave me a quote for the front; the marketing department wrote “cover copy” for the back, which I then edited, and the novel was finally ready for the printers. The Taming of the Duke was published at the end of March 2007.

  When a book first gets to bookstores (because in 2007, there were few electronic books), no one knows how it’s doing until sales numbers start coming in from bookstores and distributors like Target. Here’s a note sent on April 3, 2007, from HarperCollins’s national account manager. The subject line says “Wal-Mart Bestseller.”

  Huge week of on-sale for TAMING OF THE DUKE—Eloisa James beat out a top selling suspense novelist on the top 10 list—TAMING was #7.

  Yay! He is not talking about a best-seller list, per se—the kind that gets published in the newspaper—but about an internal sales list for book distributors and Wal-Mart.

  A week or so after that, the actual best-seller lists come out. There are three that count: t
he New York Times best-seller list, USA Today best-seller list, and Publisher’s Weekly best-seller list. The first news I got was that The Taming of the Duke had hit number ten on PW’s list, the highest I’d ever been on that list. Then I knew that the other lists were likely going to be good as well. And they were: The Taming of the Duke stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for three weeks!

  What comes next in the life of a book are reviews and letters from readers. The reviews for Taming were very positive; Romantic Times BOOKclub nominated it for Historical Romance of the Year.

  After that, more slowly, e-mail begin to pour in from around the world, as the book was translated into more and more languages (my books appear in twenty-five foreign languages, not counting special British and Australian editions).

  While most fans loved The Taming of the Duke—and a sizable percentage still say it’s their favorite of the Essex series—I also started getting mail from unhappy readers. I try to write everyone back, no matter how critical, unless they are aggressively impolite.

  Some readers pore over the novels with a fine-tooth comb. As an academic, I always find those letters particularly interesting. For example, a reader named Elizabeth wrote me about a conversation Darlington has with Griselda: “One never knows, of course, when the earth’s magnetic poles will change their position and turn this country into a sandy wasteland . . . I learned very little in school, but I do remember that.” Apparently, I was way off, and the possibility of geomagnetism polarity reversals was discovered well after 1818—in the 1950s, in fact!

  Cherie wrote from England to point out a far more embarrassing error: Lucius describes a portrait of three “children of a roundhead cavalier.” Well, the Roundheads and the Cavaliers were on opposite sides during the English Civil War. What’s more, that war took place between 1642 and 1651, so the children would definitely not be wearing “the height of Elizabethan finery,” as they are described, because Queen Elizabeth died in 1603.

  In a final example, from the first book in the series, a reader named Katheryn wrote to point out that although Much Ado About You is set in 1816, Hans Christian Andersen didn’t write The Princess and the Pea until 1835. Therefore, Rafe could not possibly have had a mural of the story painted on the nursery walls in Holbrook Court. Later on I merrily played with historical fact while writing my own version of that particular fairy story, The Duke Is Mine.

  Along with factual errors, readers also write about errors to do with Regency etiquette and culture. In fact, I would credit a good deal of the working knowledge I have of the period to interested, engaged readers. Dawa, for example, wrote to point out that when Imogen and Rafe are at Cristobel’s performance, the innkeeper tells a patron to put his sword away. As Dawa noted, swords were not common Regency accoutrements.

  The letters I’ve outlined so far are normal fare for a writer of period fiction, no matter how hard Franzeca tries to steer me away from mistakes. But when it came to The Taming of the Duke, the amount of puzzled fan mail turned from a trickle to a waterfall.

  It’s an author’s worst nightmare, frankly. It turned out that some readers could not figure out when (and whether) Imogen knew that Rafe was pretending to be his brother while they were together. They didn’t know whether Imogen was aware that Rafe was Rafe when they were making love—or whether she thought she was making love to Gabe. And they really didn’t like the idea that she thought she made love to Gabe, only to marry his brother.

  I ended up writing both a thorough explanation, and an extra chapter, a behind-the-scenes peek at a sweet conversation between Rafe and Imogen on that very subject. I’m including both. First up is my explanation of when Imogen knew that “Gabe” was actually Rafe.

  About Men in Costume (originally posted on Eloisa’s website)

  There’s a kind of literary criticism that argues that we shouldn’t even bother talking about an author’s “intention” because every reader essentially re-writes a book as she reads it, and I guess I’m more of that frame of mind than I would have thought.

  Still . . . here I go, wading in where angels fear to tread. BEWARE! If you are nurturing your own sweet progression for Rafe and Imogen, please don’t read this. Why would you want to know what I think about it? That doesn’t mean the relationship developed precisely as I say. I often feel as if I’m watching a movie while I’m writing, and Lord knows, I’m a terrible film critic!

  OK, with that slightly crack-brained proviso, I’m going to leap in. The big question is, when did Imogen realize that Rafe was hiding behind a mustache and pretending that he was Gabe? I’ll explicate some structural bits of the book, dividing the crucial chapters into separate discussions.

  One thing I want to note up front is that Rafe and Imogen’s relationship continued to develop on the side, in a very deep way, at the very same time that she was engaging in her excursions with “Gabe.”

  Obviously, Imogen has no idea of Rafe’s masquerade in the beginning. The deliciousness of writing the first scene with Rafe in a mustache, for me, was staying in Rafe’s point of view a lot of the time as he kept telling himself that of course, Imogen didn’t really want to sleep with a man—and then discovering that in fact, she did. The whole first carriage ride—the first half of Chapter 19—was leading to this sentence: “Rafe knew deep in his bones that he would do whatever it took to keep her from knowing that Gabe was indeed in the ranks of Draven and Mayne: men who were inexplicably blind to her charms and couldn’t tell a diamond from a river rock.”

  Now, Imogen’s realization of the truth is very slow, and very sweet. But you have to remember that she knows Rafe. And she already loves him, though she wouldn’t think so consciously. Why do you think she fought so hard to get him to stop drinking? Why she resented him, and fought with him, and basically, gave a damn about him? Because there was something about his rough outside and injured soul that spoke to her from the beginning, even when she was in love with her sleek and shining Draven, who turned out to be such a disappointment.

  So: one thing I want to point to in this chapter is the following sentence. They’ve just kissed.

  “Sophisticated Imogen, the young woman who had astonished—and delighted—the ton by flaunting her supposed affair with Mayne, sat on the other seat with the look of someone who had been struck by a bolt of lightning.”

  She doesn’t know that she just kissed Rafe. But deep in her soul . . . she’s just been struck by a bolt of lightning. Remember, this sentence follows directly after Imogen’s very wise comment that “Gabe” is in the carriage out of reluctant chivalry, and doesn’t really desire her.

  Imogen made some huge mistakes in judging men when she fell in love with Draven (and who doesn’t, when they first fall in love?). She needs to learn to trust her instinct . . . what you see here is her instinct sending her a message, loud and clear.

  Going back to the question of disguise . . . Cristobel is also part of the question of when Imogen knew. I invented Cristobel not only because she’s a tremendously fun character and I ended up loving her bravado and sexiness, but also because she is the ultimate person in disguise.

  In fact, the whole Cristobel chapter is about pretending to be someone else. The first woman who appears on stage is a well-endowed prostitute who is “posturing,” or pretending to be a statue of a woman in the act of undressing (men paid money for this sort of thing—go figure). She’s wearing patches to cover up spots from syphilis, the unfortunate effect of her profession.

  She’s the first example of someone dressing as someone other than she is, and covering up her face in essential ways. I had a lot of fun fiddling with Rafe’s anxiety about being found out during that scene.

  Then Cristobel comes on. Now Cristobel is the ultimate pretender. Here’s the description of her voice: “husky and erotic, a promise made in song, a mermaid’s call.” Her songs come from a wonderful collection of seductive verse: Bawdy Verse: A Pleasant Collection, edited by E. J. Burford and published by Penguin in 1982. The songs in h
is collection date from around 1400–1786; I actually judged some too wild for our delicate contemporary ears.

  Cristobel is all promise and no substance—because she really isn’t a prostitute, only a singer, and yet her career is built on the promise that she selects one man from every performance. The key is the one man is always the same one—her husband, the young man who is dressed as a farmer, and whom Rafe says was dressed as a young law student, last time he saw him. The husband is a chameleon . . . the first pretender of the scene.

  Cristobel recognizes Rafe. Because there was one time when she took a lover. The man wasn’t Rafe: it was Mayne. “He was an earl,” Cristobel says. “What a night I had with him! Your friend is a man among men.” She recognized Rafe, because in her mind he’s associated with a night of pure desire—and desire is key to Imogen’s discovery as well.

  In terms of Imogen’s awareness of whom she was with, there’s a crucial moment on page 211: “She thought he was handsome before; now the lights of the tavern played over the planes of his cheekbones and his shadowed eyes and made him look far more than handsome: dangerous . . . And the line from the play describing Dorimant kept running through her mind; Gabriel Spenser, this evening, seemed to have something of the angel yet undefaced in him.”

  On page 216, she tells him with a frown, “You do sound like Rafe!” Later on, Imogen tells Cristobel that she’ll inform the Earl of Mayne that Cristobel sends her compliments—yet how could a professor have an earl for a friend? Imogen hasn’t quite figured out yet . . . but there are certainly plenty of clues out there. One other point: in the carriage, Rafe perversely asks her what she thinks of himself—Rafe. And she refuses to answer.

  She doesn’t know . . . and yet . . . the evidence is piling up.

  Chapter 25, the Silchester scene, is crucial in terms of Imogen’s character and her understanding of the Rafe/Gabe switcheroo. Here’s the important thing, as I was thinking of it: Imogen is the kind of person who has a great deal of difficulty listening to her intuition. She knew very early that Draven would never love her the way she wanted him to. Yet she could not make herself understand the importance of that observation, and married Draven anyway.