Q&A with Eloisa James

  

 

 

Eloisa James is the author of the new novel The Last Lady B. Her many other books include Wilde in Love. She is a professor of English literature, and she lives in New York City and in Florence, Italy.

 

Q: What inspired you to write The Last Lady B, and how did you create your character Evie?

 

A: Lately I’ve been loving romances with spooky elements—gothic without too much danger and no gore.

 

I first came up with Evie’s situation (married to a man whose first three wives died in the haunted abbey), and then I wrote the scene where Evie rescues a piglet—which is pure Evie. I didn’t want a heroine in a white nightgown running screaming into the night, but I love the idea of a heroine leading a piglet on a pink ribbon.

 

Q: The book’s publicity describes it as “Jane Austen meets The White Lotus”--can you say more about that?

 

A: I looked for inspiration to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, where Austen embeds a romance in a novel that mocks and loves the gothic genre. My husband and I adore The White Lotus, especially the opening scenes when you learn someone has died but you don’t know who or how.

 

In The Last Lady B, the reader doesn’t know how Evie’s elderly husband’s first three wives died. You learn from the cover copy that her husband dies—but how?

 

Q: What role do you see ghosts playing in the novel?

 

A: I didn’t want a vengeful, scowling ghost stalking around the abbey leaving bloodstains in his wake. If I became a ghost, it would be for one reason: to protect my children. There’s my ghost, in a nutshell.

 

Q: The novel is set in a remote part of Scotland--how important is setting to you in your writing?

 

A: Setting is far more important in a gothic novel than in a historical romance. In Wilde in Love, for example, the bog outside the Wilde mansion is important, but it doesn’t set the tone of the novel. Lady B needed the eerie quality of endless fir trees, howling wolves, and a haunted abbey with secret passageways.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m writing a crazy, fun novella in which a (virgin) heroine inadvertently sleeps with her brother-in-law, becomes pregnant, and is thrown out into a dark and rainy night. I’ve moved from Austen to Dickens, but I’m loving it!

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: The Last Lady B is available in two different formats! If you’d like a personalized trade paperback with Evie on the cover, preorder from the Ripped Bodice. If you’d like a hardcover, depicting a different but still marvelous Evie, turn to Julia Quinn’s Kickstarter campaign for her romance subscription service. The novel is the same, and both covers are delightful!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Eloisa James.