Love and Romance! Themes which seem to force themselves into most novels. Love can be requited or unrequited, glorious or tragic, expressed in furious sexual activity or totally divorced from physical attraction.
Love knows no age limits. It is not confined by gender, race or any other division of human kind. And because it is a human emotion the characters created to act out the novelist's plot will no doubt have experienced love of some kind along their life journey even if they display no evidence of it for the duration of the story being told.
In A Terrible Paradise, which has just been released as an ebook, love is a tragic thing for the main character Elise Cartwright. She feels it pulling at her heart strings over a man she barely knows. It sets her off on a quest to save him from his terrible fate giving the writer the opportunity to tell the reader about the brutality of the British penal system of the nineteenth century, and the corruption and sadism which was tolerated by those in power.
Forbidden love of the young barman Tommy for his Kate colours his relations with his parents and his growing hatred of the Catholic Church in The Liberator's Birthday which is also available as an ebook.
He despises the dean who cursed Kate's father and drove him to his death, and all those who curry favour with the bombastic clergyman in the hope of gaining advantage in this world and the next.
Barriers of class, education and circumstance prevent Brigid from expressing her attraction to Eamon Darcy in the first of my novels, Brigid, to be released as an ebook, but it is clear that her love was no passing thing. it smoldered unrequited during her life, and allowed her no rest in the afterlife until she could find the means to give it expression.
Now I am embarking on a new project in which the love between two women in nineteenth century Melbourne will scandalise the family of one of them as they listen to the reading of her will.
Link to all ebooks mentioned in this blog
I, too, am a sucker for a good love story! Be it cheesy, realistic or platonic, it makes me happy. I recently read "The Book Thief" in which 2 of the main characters loved each other (not romantically, but in a platonic fashion) and I found it quite lovely.
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed the Book Thief too. Very sad but beautifully told story. I recommend it. The love between the two characters was quite wonderful. I like to write love into my stories - not necessarily romantic love, although I do that too, but I like to think that my characters have the capacity for love of all kinds. it makes them more believable.
ReplyDeleteLong live love! I've written about gay/lesbian/inter-racial sex in my published novel SHAIKH-DOWN and got a lot of flak from an Arab feminist website for doing so. But when I submitted a novel about a woman of 65 getting "a second bite of the cherry" with a 70-year-old Italian, several editors said there was No Market for that kind of romance. At 69 I've just found a new love, why can't my heroine?!
ReplyDeleteI'll wager those editors were all young. They find it difficult to imagine anyone older than them finding love and companionship. They'll find out when they get to be our age.
ReplyDeleteAs for same sex relationships I am currently writing a novel which deals with lesbian love. I'm enjoying it.