The Duke Is Mine - Eloisa James [131]
Olivia elbowed him.
“A nap,” he said, kissing her nose.
The dowager duchess looked at both of them and then away at the neat fields that spread out from the seat of the Sconces. It was not every day that she thanked God that she had chosen Georgiana to undergo that absurd series of tests she had devised, and that Georgiana had brought along Olivia.
But almost every day.
Historical Note
This novel has so many literary antecedents that I can scarcely list them: Renaissance plays, The Scarlet Pimpernel, a short story by David Foster Wallace. My primary debt, of course, is to Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea. His fairy story was panned by literary critics of his day as too chatty and informal, and they greatly disliked the double entendres surrounding that intrusively hard pea found in a maiden’s bed.
Andersen’s shocking pun gave me the idea of creating a heroine with a particular propensity for improper wordplay. We think of limericks as a form popularized by Edward Lear in The Book of Nonsense (1846), but in fact the form is much older than that. (For example, a fascinating example appears in the September 1717 diary entry of one John Thomlinson, a reverend who liked to record the scandals occurring in his parish.) Help with Olivia’s bawdy humor came from the Renaissance playwright Ben Jonson (“Turdy-facy-nasty-paty-lousy-fartical rogue!”), as well as the writers of the British television classic Black Adder (beardy-weirdy bottle-headed chub!)—whom Jonson would proudly claim as offspring.
I am also indebted to Jonson for the name Cecily Bumtrinket, a servant mentioned in one of his plays, whom I turned into a duke’s daughter. Another inspired name is Lord Justin Fiebvre . . . a character written for my twelve-year-old daughter’s delight; she is among the most fervent of the Beliebers. The novel’s conclusion was inspired by The Scarlet Pimpernel. As a teenager, I adored the scene in which Sir Percy lifts his wife as easily as if she were a feather and carries her half a league to the shore so they can escape from war-torn France in his luxurious schooner, the Day Dream.
On a historical front, jack-o’-lanterns were carved from turnips, but they did exist. And the Siege of Badajoz really happened, though I altered its details to serve my purpose—to turn Rupert into a hero. In closing, I’d like to note that Rupert’s middle names are Forrest G.
G for Gump.
Acknowledgments
My books are like small children; they take a whole village to get them to a literate state. I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to my village: my editor, Carrie Feron; my agent, Kim Witherspoon; my website designers, Wax Creative; and my personal team: Kim Castillo, Franzeca Drouin, and Anne Connell. Others kindly provided specialized knowledge: more thanks go to Thomas Henkel, Ph.D., professor emeritus of physics, Wagner College; Annie Zeidman-Karpinski, science librarian, University of Oregon; and Sylvie Clemot of Rueil Malmaison, France. I am so grateful to each of you!
Questions for Readers, for Book Clubs, for Roving Page-Turners
Dear Reader,
What follows are a few notes about less obvious aspects of The Duke Is Mine that might be fun to chat about—as well as some suggestions for what you might read next.
1. In the fairy tale The Princess and the Pea, the girl who arrives at the gate in the middle of a rainstorm turns out to be a “perfect” princess. Olivia, my heroine from The Duke Is Mine, by contrast, is no perfect heroine; she’s impudent, bawdy, and plump. Do you like your heroines to be less than perfect? How did you feel about the fact that she’s curvy? If you like Olivia, you might like Josie, the heroine of Pleasure for Pleasure: she’s another woman whose figure doesn’t suit the current style, but who learns to love herself precisely as she is.
2. In a deep sense, The Duke Is Mine is about perfection, and what that means. Think about Tarquin, who has an Aspergers-like inability to express emotion and relies on logic, and Rupert, who