Marriages of True Minds

Chatting with Miranda Neville yesterday about her new historical romance, The Wild Marquis, I became reminded of what's in some way dearest to me about writing romance fiction -- the pleasures of participating in a genre that loves female wit and of imagining lovers as hot for each other's minds as for their bodies.

I'm not sure when I first encountered such a couple in my youthful reading. Certainly there were elements in Jo March and her professor, in Darcy's admiration of Lizzy Bennet's wit and smarts (though for Austen heroes, my favorite has always been Henry Tilney, who's man enough to joke about muslin). For me, the fantasy probably found its fullest, most delicious embodiment in the sexy, brainy pairing of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane.

And when I came to write romantic fiction myself, it was because I'd found myself in the clutches of just such a fantasy: of Marie-Laure, the eponymous bookseller's very bookish, rationally-minded daughter, and Joseph, book-smuggler, tortured son of the meanest duke in pre-revolutionary France, and author of Marie-Laure's favorite libertine novel. (Oblivious of romance convention, I was as bound to set The Bookseller's Daughter in France as Joseph was destined to fall in love with Marie-Laure when she deconstructs his book!)

But even when I wasn't writing about such an explicitly bookish couple, I've always been attracted by the idea of a man and woman for being sympathetic, interested, engaged by each other's opinions, and for sometimes simply knowing without being told. What better, stronger follow-up to a night of the hottest sex I knew how to write (as I thought when I was writing Almost a Gentleman) than Phoebe's breakfast-table realization that she might actually like to share the morning newspaper with David?

He shrugged and turned back to his correspondence, after passing her the newspaper. "Not much real news, since Parliament's in holiday recess. But there's an essay on the fight for Greek emancipation that will interest you."

She stared at him. No, he wasn't mocking her. He'd known that the essay would interest her just as she'd known that something was troubling him. They'd begun to know each other. It was as ordinary -- and as miraculous -- as that.

Still, I do like what Kalen called "the brainy professor" hero, like Jasper of The Edge of Impropriety. Or the know-it-all heroine, like Mary in The Slightest Provocation.

Or the hot, funny lovers in Janet Mullany's Dedication (another reader/author love affair).

Or Loretta Chase's intrepid female Egyptologist in Mr. Impossible; Cara Elliott's scientist heroine Lady Ciara Sheffield in To Sin With a Scoundrel; Candice Hern's at-first awkwardly-matched magazine publishers, Nicholas and Prudence in her wonderful Once a Gentleman.

Or Tracy Grant's eternally vital Charles and Mélanie Fraser.

Or so many more, and certainly including Miranda Neville's most recent additions to this lineage in The Wild Marquis...

...a copy of which you have a chance to win, just by commenting here (tell us about your favorite brainy lovers -- in romance, in other fiction, or in history).

Or by commenting at the previous post, where Miranda tells us more about herself and her book.