Catching up with romance writer, mary balogh
Profile: How to hit the NY Times Bestseller List. . . 19 times “When I started writing I wrote the book I wanted to write,” says Mary Balogh, Regina writer and author of 19 New York Times Bestsellers. “People at the time always used to say that I’d broken all the rules and I used to say to these people in great frustration, ‘Well, where are these rules? Who wrote these rules? I’ve never seen them. How can you break rules when nobody can produce these rules?’ ” Most of the 100 or so novels and novellas she’s written are Regency Romances. Regency romances are set in England during a nine year period between 1811 and 1820 when the Prince of Wales ruled as Prince Regent. They’re said to be a distinct genre with plot and stylistic conventions that derive from the works of Jane Austin, Georgette Heyer and Clare Darcy and from the fiction genre known as the novel of manners. Balogh’s first book, A Masked Deception, differed from the other Regencies on offer in 1985, in that it included explicit sex as did her others that followed. “Sex is a part of any romantic relationship,” she says in an online article by Liz French, for the Romantic Times, “so I have almost always included it in my books. I’ve often pointed out that if there was
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Photograph courtesy of Mary Balogh
no sex in Regency England, Britain would be rather an empty island now. . .” A subsequent title, A Precious Jewel, features a rather unintelligent hero and a heroine who is his mistress. The Wood Nymph picks up the story of a rejected suitor from a previous novel. But Balogh refutes the notion that she was and is a rule
breaker and a trend-setter. “They were just a little different from most other people’s I suppose. I never had any sense of being a rebel or breaking the rules because there were no rules. I wrote my own novels set in historical periods.” Welsh-born Balogh discovered Regencies when she was on maternity leave from her job DECEMBER 2011 - JANUARY 2012