In Regency England, beauty and talent are not enough to be considered marriage material, so when the eminently eligible Lord Charles Latimer sets his heart on Angelica, his uncle is sent to intervene.
A Writing Life
My writing life has certainly been one of serendipity, over which we have little control. But after many decades of writing and publishing, it has also been one of tenacity and hard work, which is entirely in our own hands. The serendipity came to me when I left London University and decided to enter the Vogue Talent Competition.
This was a well-established way to stand a very slim chance of being offered a job by Condé Nast in their flagship building Vogue House, in Hanover Square in Mayfair, London. One of the assignments of the competition was to write an autobiography. I was an entirely green girl and was amazed to be awarded, as runner-up prize, a job in the editorial side of British Vogue! There began one of the most surprising and enjoyable times of my life.
Working for Vogue, however lowly my job, opened the next door. I met Christopher Falkus, the MD of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, at a publishing party I was trying to avoid (I had 2 small children and would rather have stayed home with them) and he said in an airy way, ‘Write me a book.’ Mr Falkus had had some success with writers who had worked for Vogue, and biographies were all the rage.
From nowhere the name Mary Shelley, wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of Frankenstein, shot into my mind. When I discovered there had been no biography of her since the 1930s, I wrote to him and said, I will write you a biography of Mary Shelley. I was commissioned for £500 and so it all began.
I put my children to bed at 6pm and wrote while they slept.
I put my children to bed at 6pm and wrote while they slept.
This was pre-internet so every morsel of information had to be gleaned from books and manuscripts which meant endless, time-consuming visits to wonderful libraries in London and America. My first book Moon in Eclipse was well-received by the critics and I realised I could be a biographer and this was a career I could manage while looking after my children, even as a single parent. It also introduced me to the Romantic Poets, the Napoleonic Wars and late Georgian politics, manners and history, and I fell in love with the period.
My most commercially successful biography was Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens about the relationship between the cousin queens, Elizabeth l and Mary Queen of Scots, published by HarperCollins. It actually entered The Sunday Times and New York Times Bestseller lists and stayed there for some weeks. An ambitious undertaking, it took every ounce of my resources. Inevitably, with the passing years, my energy for writing biographies, which take years to research and write, began to wane, as did publishers’ appetite for them. So I happily hung up my quill and thought my public writing life was done.
But No! I read a witty article in The Times about the genius of Georgette Heyer and I was reminded of my love for her when I was a teenager. I re-read every one of her novels and when I came to the end I did not want to leave this brilliant Regency world behind. So I sat down to write my own. Luckily my agent, an heroic Scot who had never read a Regency Romance in his life, loved it and sold it to Boldwood Books. They are remarkably collaborative and I have had terrific fun writing these stories for them to publish. They have surprised me with joy – and success!
I have always loved writing about women and now I was writing about fictional women who existed on the edge of Regency high society. My first was The Marriage Season about a young widow of the Peninsular War and her sister who live in the country and decide to go to London for the Season so Lucie can find a suitable match. There is a toddler son, fleets of magnificent horses (the Ferraris of the Regency) and heroes, raffish friends and dark-souled villains to die for.
My second was An Unsuitable Heiress about a motherless, illegitimate young woman who is too poor to hire a maid as chaperone. To be able to travel to London alone to find her father and become a portrait painter she disguises herself as a young man. Of course all kinds of adventures and eye-opening situations occur as she’s befriended by 3 young blades and introduced to masculine Regency life.
My latest book, published in January 2024, is A Scandalous Match, about a young actress, Angelica Leigh, from the wrong side of the tracks who is a sensation playing Ophelia to Kean’s Hamlet. The young son of a duke falls in love and determines to marry her, causing all kinds of consternation to his family.
An actress is only one rung socially above a courtesan and such déclassé women rarely become legitimate members of the Haut Ton. So his uncle, a reforming Whig MP, is despatched to buy her off…Dodgy parents, a predatory Tory MP, a Byronic poet swirl through the pages. Against all the odds our lovely Angelica finds true love – of course! She has the kind of good looks to stop traffic and this Leighton painting of the Siren and Sailor gave me the idea of her beauty and lovely red-gold hair.
So the moral of my tale is: never say never. If you are open to new challenges you may start a whole new chapter of your life, or veer off into an unexpected byway of your work. When serendipity offers you a hand, grab it and run with all your might – and you are bound to win in one way or another, and have a great deal of fun along the way.
So the moral of my tale is: never say never. If you are open to new challenges you may start a whole new chapter of your life, or veer off into an unexpected byway of your work. When serendipity offers you a hand, grab it and run with all your might – and you are bound to win in one way or another, and have a great deal of fun along the way.
Thank you to all my wonderful readers, to Tony Riches for his generosity in asking me to contribute to his blog, and Good Luck to you all in every endeavour.
Jane Dunn
Jane Dunn is an historian and biographer and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first job after university was at British Vogue - she was runner-up in their annual talent competition and lucky enough to be offered a job in the editorial side of British Vogue. Jane began writing historical fiction, specifically set in the Regency in the time of the Napoleonic Wars. An elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Jane lives in Berkshire with her husband, the Classicist, Nicholas Ostler, and an elderly rescue whippet. You can find Jane on Goodreads and Twitter @JaneDunnAuthor
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About the Author
