Exclusive Extras
Mea Culpa, Much Ado About You
- Cherie wrote from England to point out a hideous historical error: on page 286, Lucius describes a portrait of three “children of a roundhead cavalier.” Well, the Roundheads and the Cavaliers were on opposite sides during the English Civil War! And that war took place between 1642 and 1651, so the children would definitely not be wearing “the height of Elizabethan finery,” as they are described on page 359 (Queen Elizabeth died in 1603). I have no defense for this. But may I add a fascinating fact? Much Ado About You was re edited and copy-edited for the English edition by English editors and English copyeditors — and their edition features a roundhead cavalier too!
- Writing books is like any other job: there are those moments when you wonder, “How could I have done that? How could I have been so absent-minded / foolish / careless?” When I wrote Fool for Love, I gave Darby two little sisters, Anabel and Josie, and Henrietta one sister, Imogen. Then a few years later, I started a series about four sisters. I must have changed their names a hundred times. For a while, the youngest sister was Petronella. Eventually I named the eldest sister Tess, and then I found three names for Tess’s sisters that just sounded…right. Yep! Annabel, Josie and Imogen sprang back into life. There is no connection between my earlier characters and these; please forgive me if I confused you. A reader named Carol was kind enough to point this out to me.
- Katheryn Carrier wrote me to point out that while Much Ado About You is set in 1816, Hans Christian Andersen didn’t write The Princess and the Pea until 1835. Therefore Rafe could not possibly have had a mural of the story painted on the nursery walls in Holbrook Court.
- Erratum! On page 315, paragraph 3, Imogen makes a reference to Lucius that should, in fact, be a reference to her husband. The sentence SHOULD read: “Draven has all his hopes riding on him.”
- From Fanny, who once read history at Oxford: “When you talk about a horse’s breeding, you say BY [the sire] and OUT OF [the dam].” Needless to say, I messed this up somewhere in Much Ado About You.