Sarah MacLean: The Season

By high school, thanks to my older (and much wiser) sister, I was thoroughly obsessed with historical fiction. I would become enamored of whole eras and read anything and everything I could get my hands on that related to them. I went through phases — the Civil War, medieval England, the Vikings, the Italian Renaissance.

Then I found Jane Austen. And I was hooked. Here was an author (a woman, no less!) who went against everything that had been written before and who birthed a genre of literature. She cast aside the melodramatic gothic romance that had dominated "literature for women" for decades and that the Bronte sisters (whom I could never quite stomach) would eventually canonize, and instead made romance fun... and funny... and real. Austen's heroines were cheeky and ironic, her heroes dark and brooding and arrogant to a fault. The combination of the two, for the teenager I was then and the twenty-something I am now, was electric.

That's when I fell in love with Regency England. I imagine that I — and everyone around me — thought it was just another one of my historical phases... but I never seemed to grow out of this one. I spent much of my teenage years, nose buried in historical romances, bemoaning the fact that I was born more than a century too late to enter the swirling beau monde that waltzed its way through the glittering ball rooms of London for my own season.

All was not lost, however. Through a stroke of very good luck I found myself at Smith College, where I was free to explore my wild obsessions. I had a group of friends who shared my love of historical fiction; we traded romances, talked Austen, and imagined what it would be like to be courted... really courted. I majored in history and somewhere along the way learned a rhyme that lists the Kings and Queens of England in order. After graduation, I went on a trip across Britain with my mother. We stopped in Hampshire, where I sat in the gardens of the Austen home and breathed the air of Aunt Jane.

Next, I found my way to New York, where I took a job in publishing and all those years of reading paid off. I bounced through several jobs and a graduate degree, amassing an unfathomably large collection of Regency fiction along the way, which fill s the bookshelves of my Brooklyn home to bursting. I am lucky to have a husband and dog who overlook my eccentricities and, sometimes, love me better for them.

And now, I'm happy to say that, through writing, I have the chance to put my crazy, eclectic life to good use and, while I may never be able to live up to the British spy and the jet-setting Italian, my characters are certainly making a go of it.