Do you remember your first Kathleen E. Woodiwiss? I do.

It was one of those endless summer days when even the dust motes seem sleepy. I had already read through my entire Jude Deveraux collection, played all the Barbies any eleven year old can be expected to play, and ascertained that there was nothing at all on television. In short, I was bored. Taking myself to the cool of the basement, I searched through the motley collection of books that had been exiled from the bookcases upstairs. I bypassed M.M. Kaye (it was hot enough out already without reading about India) and listlessly discarded Kristin Lavransdotter, which looked like it ought to be a romance, but wasn’t. And there it was, “A Rose in Winter.” It didn’t look like much to write home about. The cover was a dirty white, the spine was broken, the pages were already yellowing. Within ten minutes, none of that mattered. I was in 18th century Northern England, and I didn’t want to ever come back.

Kathleen E. Woodiwiss is one of those authors the critics love to hate. Her prose is purple, her plots improbable– and yet it all works, every last palpitating particle of prose, every heaving and throbbing plot twist. Her plot devices echo the great archetypes of fiction, from a heroine sold off to the hooded master of a ruined castle (Beauty and the Beast spiced up with a Woodiwiss twist) to the plucky young girl who masquerades as a scrappy lad while the man she loves courts her beautiful cousin (anyone recognize “Twelfth Night”?), and they appeal at that same visceral level.

In the Woodiwiss word, good is good and evil is evil and everyone gets their just desserts. You know who to root for. And you do. I remember spending a long afternoon in law school, breathlessly re-reading “The Wolf and the Dove,” aching to see the hero’s treacherous half-sister get her comeuppance. (Woodiwiss is especially brilliant at comeuppances.) Nearly two decades after reading my first Woodiwiss, her books still have the same power to hold me in thrall.

I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Kathleen E. Woodiwiss. I owe her hours of daydreams, free passes to half a dozen historical periods, and a large chunk of my vocabulary. But for that much-mocked multisyllabic prose, my SAT verbal score would have doubtless been a good deal lower. She wrote with passion and panache (or, as my little sister likes to say, with ganache). With her passing last week, the world lost one of the grande dames of romance.

In homage, I intend to spend the weekend re-reading my four favorite Woodiwiss works: “A Rose in Winter,” “The Wolf and the Dove,” “The Flame and the Flower,” and “Ashes in the Wind.”

Do you have a favorite Woodiwiss?