Author: Rose Lerner

As part of my blog tour for Sweet Disorder, I wrote a guest post at Heroes and Heartbreakers about the tradition of widows and dead first husbands in historical romance. For that post, I interviewed the authors of some of my favorite historicals with widow heroines, and I got back such awesome, detailed answers that I wanted to share the complete interviews with you.

Here’s what Courtney Milan had to say about her heartwrenching, amazing The Countess Conspiracy.

Two warnings: this post contains mentions of rape and abuse, and there is a major spoiler for the series in the upcoming back cover copy.

Sebastian Malheur is the most dangerous sort of rake: an educated one. When he’s not scandalizing ladies in the bedchamber, he’s outraging proper society with his scientific theories. He’s desired, reviled, acclaimed, and despised—and he laughs through it all.

Violet Waterfield, the widowed Countess of Cambury, on the other hand, is entirely respectable, and she’d like to stay that way. But Violet has a secret that is beyond ruinous, one that ties her irrevocably to England’s most infamous scoundrel: Sebastian’s theories aren’t his. They’re hers.

So when Sebastian threatens to dissolve their years-long conspiracy, she’ll do anything to save their partnership…even if it means opening her vulnerable heart to the rake who could destroy it for good.

“Dead first husband” is hereafter abbreviated DFH.

RL: DFHs fall on a spectrum between evil abusive assholes and great guys the heroine could have been with forever if they’d lived. Where do you see Lord Cambury as falling, and did you know from the start where you wanted Lord Cambury to land?

CM: Lord Cambury absolutely falls on the “abusive asshole” end of the spectrum, with the caveat that his behavior at the time would not have been seen as particularly abusive. I don’t want to say more because spoilers, but while I think his behavior is awful and unforgivable, it’s also something that wouldn’t have been seen as anything other than aggressive at the time. You can find tales of that kind of thing happening to all kinds of degrees back then.

I’d planned for him to be a Not Great Guy from the beginning. The exact details shifted over time, though.

RL: DFHs mean something a little different in Regency- and Victorian-set historicals since divorce wasn’t widely available. Like, if the heroine is married to someone other than the hero, he has to die for her to marry the hero. How do you think that affected your story?

CM: I don’t think it did.

I think the story is more affected by other powers that a husband has over a wife in that time period. For instance, they refer to sexual intercourse between a husband and his wife as the man’s “marital rights”—something that if you really think about it, is kind of gross, because it erases the notion of the wife being able to refuse sexual intercourse with her husband.

[RL’s note: Depressingly enough, marital rape did not start to become a crime in the U.S. until the mid-1970s.]

RL: How do you think Violet’s experience of marriage affects how she’s been living the rest of her life—not just practically, but emotionally, and in what she expects and doesn’t let herself expect? (This is a really basic question, I guess, since that’s so central to the story, but we also didn’t see Violet before her marriage, when she was already living by her mother’s rules. I basically would read ALL the backstory fic in the world about what she was like as a girl, and in the first months of her marriage when she thought things were going to turn out well.)

CM: Violet’s mother gave her girls a pretty good grounding in proper behavior, and society did the rest. Women are supposed to defer to their husbands. They’re taught to do that, taught that men know best, taught that men are the ones that will keep them safe. So when things don’t go down that way—when the things that everyone has been telling her don’t quite turn out that way—I think it’s hard for her not to blame herself. As the book starts, Violet has internalized a lot of her husband’s criticism. It may not be rational, but I think it’s pretty normal.

Continue reading “DFH Interview #7: Courtney Milan”

As part of my blog tour for Sweet Disorder, I wrote a guest post at Heroes and Heartbreakers about the tradition of widows and dead first husbands in historical romance. For that post, I interviewed the authors of some of my favorite historicals with widow heroines, and I got back such awesome, detailed answers that I wanted to share the complete interviews with you.

Lauren Willig’s The Betrayal of the Blood Lily is one of my very favorite dead first husband stories because Penelope and Freddy are still married at the beginning of the book, so we get to see their relationship (which is mostly bad, but not all bad) and we get to see her grieve for him, too.

Everyone warned Miss Penelope Deveraux that her unruly behavior would land her in disgrace someday. She never imagined she’d be whisked off to India to give the scandal of her hasty marriage time to die down. As Lady Frederick Staines, Penelope plunges into the treacherous waters of the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad, where no one is quite what they seem—even her own husband. In a strange country where elaborate court dress masks even more elaborate intrigues and a spy called the Marigold leaves cobras as his calling card, there is only one person Penelope can trust…

Captain Alex Reid has better things to do than play nursemaid to a pair of aristocrats. He knows what their kind is like. Or so he thinks—until Lady Frederick Staines out-shoots, out-rides, and out-swims every man in the camp. She also has an uncanny ability to draw out the deadly plans of the Marigold and put herself in harm’s way. With danger looming from local warlords, treacherous court officials, and French spies, Alex realizes that an alliance with Lady Frederick just might be the only thing standing in the way of a plot designed to rock the very foundations of the British Empire.

“Dead first husband” is hereafter abbreviated DFH.

RL: DFHs fall on a spectrum between evil abusive assholes and great guys the heroine could have been with forever if they’d lived. How did you decide where on the spectrum you wanted Freddy to land? (And let me just pause for a second here to talk about how much I LOVE Freddy and Penelope’s relationship. Because they had an awful marriage but she also kind of loved him? And I also loved that their problems weren’t sexual. Also I just have a soft spot for Freddy’s type of jerkness. But seriously, <333.)

LW: I was frustrated with the trope of the first husband who is old, cold, and, for, bonus points, evil with a capital E. When I was writing The Betrayal of the Blood Lily, I wanted to address the question of: what happens when the heroine marries the wrong guy? Not a parentally arranged marriage to a much older man, not a nightmare marriage to an incurable sadist, but just your fairly typical specimen of slightly debauched aristocratic manhood, no better and no worse than many of his fellows. When I imagined Freddy, I saw him as a frat boy in Regency clothing, with an elaborately tied cravat rather than a baseball cap, and a decanter of claret rather than a keg of beer. It’s not that Freddy is evil; he’s just entirely the wrong person for Penelope, who is much more complicated than her public persona of daredevil debutante would suggest. They bring out the worst in each other, while, at the same time, being very physically attracted to each other—which is what got them into their mismatch in the first place.

Having them be physically attracted to each other, even in the worst of their troubles, was very important to me. For one, because without that attraction they would never be forced into their marriage of inconvenience, but also because I have less than fond memories of all of the romances I read during the 90s in which the heroine’s first husband was invariably impotent, deviant, inept, or just plain not interested in women. Penelope is a very passionate woman. I wanted the sexual chemistry to be the one thing in Penelope and Freddy’s relationship that did work.

On the other end of the spectrum from the evil first husband, you have what I think of as the Sainted First Husband trope: the one who was so wonderful that the heroine Can Never Get Over Him To Love Again (that is, until she meets the hero). This is one I played with in another book, The Garden Intrigue, in which my heroine, Emma Morris, ran off with a much older Frenchman, Paul Delagardie, when she was only fifteen. When we meet Emma a decade later, she’s grappling with her husband’s death—not because he was perfect, but because she had only just learned to love him for his imperfections. When sixtee-year-old Emma realized her husband wasn’t the romantic swain of her imaginings—after alienating her important family by eloping with him—she went off in a sulk. Over time, though, she and her husband had arrived at their own peace, and his death of a fever years later, just when they were truly beginning to understand each other not for their early romantic imaginings, but for who they really are, throws her for a loop and makes her curl up like a hedgehog. Continue reading “DFH interview #6: Lauren Willig”