I want to be accessible to modern readers and yet historically true. I don’t want my heroines to be 20th century characters wearing regency dress because that would not be true historically, yet at the same time, I don’t want to have my heroines be terribly submissive and victims of the system. And so I try to do that sort of thing with my books. They were prepared for a very dreary spinsterhood for the rest of their lives. They have this strength to give everything up, which was a much worse fate in those days when women had far fewer options. Elizabeth Bennett, although obviously in love with D’arcy, actually gives him up because of his terrible pride and condescension to her. They are very true to themselves even if it means losing their man. There’s a great air of independence and dignity about the heroines from these books. I always cite Pride & Prejudice and Jane Eyre, obviously written by authors at the time, as books that are obviously true to their times. I like to use as my model actual books that were written at the time. Some books annoy me when I find heroines in particular far too independent and sort of savvy for their historical time. I don’t like to be historically inaccurate. constraints or do you think it’s perfectly acceptable since you are writing today even though the books are set 170 years ago? Do you feel limited, does it bother you to write in those P.C. Talk more about political correctness in romance. I did look at some historicals around then, but somehow the ones I picked up I really didn’t like the heroes – I found them quite nasty. So I kind of dithered for awhile and figure out what I wanted to do. Make them historically accurate and yet acceptable to modern readers. At the same time you have to make them true to their own time. But you couldn’t get away with that image of a woman in a modern romance so you have to give them strength of character. They were possessions rather than persons in the regency era. They have to be a little more submissive. You have to do the corresponding thing with women. You have to somehow skirt around that and make the heroes sensitive to women and respect them even while obviously they were a bit more dominating than modern men would be. That might be an historically accurate way to look at men and women, but you really can’t get away with that in modern novels. You’re going to alienate readers if you have terribly domineering men and very submissive women. The attitudes between men and women – it has to be politically correct even when you’re writing historicals. I write the Regency and Georgian periods, so I’ll limit my comments to then. What do you think are the differences between people in historical novels and now? Human nature is the same, but how do different historical times affect the interactions of your characters?

The Plumed Bonnet by Mary Balogh