The Girl from Summer Hill (39 page)

This book was difficult to write. Think “screaming pain.” Too often, I was on the floor pounding fists and feet and yelling sacrilegious things about Jane Austen.

Since I'd read
Pride and Prejudice
so many times and seen every TV/movie version, I thought it would be a cinch to rewrite it.

Ha! Looking at a book from a writer's POV is very different from that of a reader/viewer.

How could I make my heroine believe a man's lies when they could be checked on the Internet? How did a man run off with a fifteen-year-old girl and not have criminal charges brought against him? And why, oh why did Wickham get to do so many rotten things but was never punished?

It took a lot of thinking—and a massive rewrite—to bring the story into the modern world and make it close to being the dreaded “politically correct.” Endlessly asking permission wears a romance author out!

At the end I was so brain-dead that I decided not to put in the play. Jane ended her book with “I love you,” so I could too. But I put on my must-do hat and wrote the play with three versions of
Pride and Prejudice
going on: Jane's, the one in the script, and the one offstage.

When I finished the book, I sent it to my dear editor, Linda Marrow, without a final read-through. I fully expected the ol' let's-have-lunch response: the death knell over chocolate when she told me the book was awful.

When she said she loved it, I argued with her. I still think Ms. Austen should have taken up a hobby other than “making up characters.”

I would like to thank Linda for her praise and for listening to me complain so much. My Facebook buddies are always great with their many comments.

Thanks to Mary Bralove for saying in horror, “But she
has
to be fifteen!”

And thanks to all the people at Random House who read the book and said, “I loved the opening scene.” I'm not sure, but I don't think that was a truly scholarly choice.

True Love

For All Time

Ever After

The Girl from Summer Hill

Jude Deveraux is the author of forty-three
New York Times
bestsellers to date, including
Moonlight in the Morning
and
A Knight in Shining Armor.
There are more than sixty million copies of her work in print worldwide.

jude-deveraux.com

Facebook.com/​JudeDeveraux

@JudeDeveraux1