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(Curiously, no one at all has ever complained of the rampant child abuse that takes place in the books. Perfectly okay for Jamie to beat his nephew [Voyager, chapter 32, “The Prodigal’s Return”] and his foster son (age ten or so) [Dragonfly, chapter 14, “Meditations on the Flesh”], and no objections whatever to Jamie’s graphic descriptions of his own disciplinary experiences while growing up [Outlander, chapter 22, “Reckonings”]—but to see him using violence on a woman is evidently enough to cause a major reaction in some women.)17 Still, people’s perceptions will always be colored by experience. Response to some material on the basis of personal experience is entirely understandable and I sympathize with such attitudes, but I can’t in good conscience think them relevant to my own work.

MINOR ISSUES

“Minor issues” are those subjects on which I have received obviously sincere letters—but from only one or two people. I respect their opinions, but apparently these fall into the realm of responses that depend on the reader’s individual perception and experience. Following are my responses to the letters in question (the content of the original letters being plain from the replies).

Body Image

May 5, 1994

Dear S:

Thanks for your thoughtful letter; I enjoyed it, and your analysis of historical attitudes toward plumpness, which are of course accurate.

However… are we possibly overreacting a bit here? Claire has not got an eating disorder, nor is there the slightest implication that she has, in any of the three books. She eats rather heartily, whenever food is available (as you note, it often wasn’t), appears to enjoy it, judging by her descriptions of aromas and tastes, and there isn’t any indication at all of her dieting, obsessing about food, allowing eating to control her behavior, or worrying in the least about her food intake or whether she’s getting fat.

I took some pains to make sure she didn’t appear as the “standard” heroine in Outlander, including the historically accurate (as you note) appreciation for a well-endowed rear. I didn’t do so out of any political position on what women ought to look like; merely out of a sense of contrariness (having read way too many novels with eighteen-year-old slender heroines), and an urge to make Claire as believable and human as possible.

I don’t know quite what you mean, that “the second book had not a peep about Claire’s physical attributes, other than Jamie’s continued enjoyment of them.” Since she’s pregnant through the first half of Dragonfly, descriptions of her weight and/or build seemed more or less irrelevant—she describes her heaviness, and “waddling up to take a nap,” along with the loosening of joints, breast swelling, etc., which surely ought not to give anybody the notion that she’s a slender waif. Jamie certainly continues to be physically attracted to her, pregnant or not, which I would think might convey the notion that slenderness is not one of his—or Claire’s—criteria. Hardly “not a peep,” though; Claire talks about her body and is aware of it throughout the books; whether or not she refers constantly to the size of her bottom seems rather irrelevant.

What seems to bother you is the third book—that Claire would have examined herself in the mirror before going back through the stones, and that she included “don’t get fat” in her letter of motherly advice to Brianna.

As I said before, Claire is (I hope) human and believable. Whether women should worry about their looks in sexual situations is irrelevant—they do. Whether men should be attracted to women on the basis of their looks is also irrelevant—they are. I’m not pushing propaganda, here; I’m telling a story about two people, as real as I can make them.

Were I going to see a man with whom I had had a passionate physical relationship twenty years ago—with the specific intent of resuming said physical relationship—I would definitely take a good look at myself and wonder what the lover