Tag Archives: love story

Before The Crown there was a love story

COMING 17th September: Before the Crown

One of my favourite authors has written Before the Crown, the wartime love story between a very young Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN.
I asked Flora Harding to tell me about it.

Young Royals

Sophie        I say a very young Princess Elizabeth. But actually she and Prince Philip must have known each other all their lives. Weren’t they related?

Princess Elizabeth with Dookie

FLORA   Yes, they’re both directly descended from Queen Victoria and part of an extended network of royal relatives. They would have come across each other at odd family occasions like weddings or George VI’s Coronation.

But there was a five-year age gap. They don’t seem to have had much to do with each other until the famous encounter in 1939. Continue reading →

Be My Valentine? I Don’t Think So

old laptop with valentineWhen email was new and spam was something you found in school lunches, I once got a message on my hefty laptop headed “Be My Valentine?”

I deleted it, unopened.

With a shudder. And I’d never even heard of viruses then. I just didn’t want to go there. Continue reading →

Wedding Dilemma

wedding dilemma to show or not to show on the pageAt some point every romantic novelist faces the Wedding Dilemma.

Will they?
Won’t they?
If they do — how, when and where?
On the page?
On the last page?

Of course, the purist’s answer is: whatever is right for the characters. But, just as organising a real-life wedding needs to take account of friends and family, the end of a story — perhaps more than any other part of the book — is there to satisfy Readers. To provide emotional closure.

wedding dilemma for the child bridesmaid

 

Do Readers want, need a wedding to achieve that? Even if the characters don’t? Continue reading →

Wanna Wallow, Dear Reader?

Georgette Heyer’s endings

Re-reading some of my favourite Georgette Heyer novels recently — Dame Isadora snagged me as the minion to do the research for her blogs because she, being a Very Important Personage, had Better Things To Do — I was struck by how often Heyer brings her lovers together at the very end of her novels, sometimes on the very last page.

bride and groom pre wallow
Heyer might give us a chaste embrace. She might even give us a fierce kiss or two. And she often adds a shared joke.
But that’s about it.

What we don’t get in Heyer is a lovers’ wallow.

What’s a wallow?

I’d describe the wallow as a shortish section at the end of a love story where the reader sees the lovers together and passionately in love — both of them trusting and relaxed and happy. Sometimes the lovers are married, sometimes they have had children, sometimes they are simply enjoying each other.

wallow on tropical beach

 

 

It’s the Happy Ever After ending shown right there on the page for the reader to savour.

 

 

Some readers love a wallow. Some readers even feel shortchanged if a novel doesn’t have one at the end. But readers still love all those Heyer novels that don’t have the merest hint of a wallow. So…

Does a love story need a wallow?

Continue reading →