Shadows of the Night
by Lydia Joyce
The idea for SHADOWS OF THE NIGHT came from the thought that not every “society marriage” should be condemned as pointless in romance merely because it was undertaken for less-than-romantically-admirable reasons.
Romance very often idolizes the heroine who will settle for no less than true love in a marriage, and it discards the social marriage with scorn for its sheer conventionality. There is an unspoken rule that the heroine who does not risk enough for love–however stupidly–does not, in fact, deserve it. There is a place for heroines who look for neither love nor marriage or who are distracted from a conventional relationship by a passionate one, but there is no room for a heroine who enters willingly into a tepid marriage to find happiness with that husband. If she is to be a true heroine, the first husand must die, and the heroine must be awakened by the ardent attentions of her true hero so that she realizes, first, that she really loves this guy better and, second, what good sex really is–not necessarily in that order. There is plenty of room for coercive marriages between antagonists in romance and for arranged marriages between strangers that ignite into passion, but for those who go willingly into socially unspectacular marriages, there is no mercy in Romancedom.
I wasn’t going to buy that. If I have a woman who really is heroine material–who is just waiting for the touch of the right man to awaken the depths within her apparently conventional soul–why must she suffer through a dull marriage for five or ten years to give her first husband time to die so the real hero can sweep her off her feet? And if this heroine really does have some true depth to her, why is its revelation entirely dependent upon the sexual vagaries of some jaded rake?
What I wanted to show was how the conventionality of a heroine’s marriage–Fern’s marriage–could itself become a kund of psychological catalyst. Because of the very banal nature of the marriage to Colin, Fern realizes that banality is intolerable to her and that she must have more.
Her assertion of independence from the stereotyped Victorian wife is as violent as the feelings within her, and this reaction, turned against Colin, is the only thing that could have shaken him from his own state of mental torpor. The discovery of controlled pain in turn opens the door to true pleasures for Colin for the first time, and his discovery, though through a different medium, mirrors Fern. Colin and Fern must have more: more sensation, more sensuality, more intimacy, more emotion, more independence and interdependence–more of everything. This demands a negotiation of their relationship that cannot take place in front of prying eyes, and so Colin whisks Fern off to an isolated estate.
There, they can explore their new world of pleasure, pain, and power in seclusion. But they are not entirely alone, for the ancient, crumbling manor is haunted by the secrets of Colin’s present and his past, any of which can destroy their fragile, nascent love–and their lives.
Colin’s character took longer for me to discover than Fern’s. While Fern suspected and feared the parts of herself that were less than socially acceptable before her marriage, but Colin did not–could not–already have this kind of perspective.
First, there are simple, story-related reasons. You can’t have your two main characters as echoes as one another; they must have distinct character arcs.
Second, though, Colin’s social position was too powerful to allow him to have those kinds of impulses without giving him the ability to act on them. Fern had very good reasons for not breaking with the very narrow stereotypes of the ideal Victorian wife. If Colin had felt similarly about his own role before his marriage, though, he would have had the freedom to do a great deal about it–and if he had not, it would reflect very poorly on his character, and there would be very little reason for his marriage to cause him to act on impulses he’s been ignoring for years.
Therefore, Colin had to really be exactly who he appeared at first. Unlike Fern, he had to have a true awakening, a rousing from a mental somnolence. And Fern had to be a vehicle for this awakening.
I really enjoyed choosing the settings for this book. Brighton is rather difficult to make Gothic–it’s a beach resort, after all! But elements of its crowdedness did work surprisingly well, as well as the sheer architectural oddity of the Brighton Pavilion. The choice of the Devon bog wasn’t as much of a shoo-in as it might have been. My first thought was to find the most heavily forested area remaining in England–an island of William the Conqueror’s New Forest or something similar.
But that simply didn’t work very well for the story, and after a while, I began thinking of the setting of the Hound of the Baskervilles. That worked much better. I even decided to have a butterfly-obsessed character in explicit homage to the villian of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s book, which was a great deal of fun to write. The expected thing would be to have chase through the bog in which the hero would get mired barely escapes, but instead, I decided to use the bog to make the manor house more contained and claustrophobic.
The parallel historical “secret” and current story originally had a very different shape–there was originally no historical secret at all. The creation of the mystery was at the request of my editor, who wanted more external plot than I had originally intended to write. Like all the mysteries in my novels, it is not the point of the story. It is, at most, a McGuffin or something for the current emotional story arc to play off of. This is why it takes up so little space in the story–it’s scarcely important to it. In my next story, I’ve gotten away with no secondary story, which I really do prefer when I’m allowed to write it!
Leave a comment for a chance to win a copy of Shadows of the Night!
I’ve enjoyed your previous books so I’m looking forward to reading this one too.
