Eloisa James Features Dyslexic Heroine in 'Viscount in Love'

New York Times bestselling author and professor of English literature, Eloisa James, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss her newest historical romance, Viscount in Love. The first novel in her Accidental Brides series,Viscount in Love tells the story of Viscount Dominic Kelbourne, the caregiver of two orphaned twins, who has intentions of marrying his fiancée Leonora, but when she unexpectedly elopes, he marries her sister, Torie, instead. Set in the Regency period,Viscount in Love includes characters who are part of the British aristocracy, and for those new to James’ novels, she explains the hierarchy of their peerage system. “[Viscounts are] quite high up, but they’re not royal. They’re aristocrats, they’re nobleman. So, you have dukes at the very top and a viscount is below that, but very high in the aristocracy. Still very rich, mostly, then you fall down to things like a baron who’s at the bottom of the aristocracy and the top of the gentry, and [he] would just be Lord Kelbourne as opposed to Viscount Kelbourne…” As to why James decided to make her protagonist a viscount rather than a duke, she said, “I wanted him to have a slightly different degree partly because my heroine Torie is being courted by a duke, so the obvious thing would be to select that duke as opposed to choosing the viscount, particularly because this viscount has recently inherited two extremely eccentric orphan children who will have to be brought into the market, the marriage market… where anyone who is different or extraordinary in any way can really have trouble finding a spouse… so she chooses the viscount rather than the duke and that actually is quite a significant point of fact.”

Concerning the argument that books in the romance genre are deemed frivolous and silly, James remarked, “I just think that whatever the genre is, and literature is a genre like anything else, you’re going to have books that are extremely well written… and you’re going to have books that are not… So, I think it’s exactly the same in whatever genre it is. Mysteries, there are brilliant mysteries and there are some that are so tedious that you cannot even make it through to find out who did it… Romance in particular is, I think, more challenging to write actually than most other genres because the reader already knows the end… it takes a lot of work, it takes a lot of editing, it takes a lot of rewriting, and takes a lot of thought, in my opinion. We have brilliant romances being written all over the place and not just in historical… Like Ali Hazelwood, who was a physicist professor who now writes romance, but a lot of her books deal with unfairness in STEM and unfairness in the science profession… but it’s in such an amusing and wonderful way, it’s just so much fun to read. So rather than some polemical article, you actually read a story that ends beautifully, that is fun, and I think that’s one of the gifts of genre fiction.”