At the dawn of the nineteenth century two strangers set sail for a Caribbean island where sugar is king and human life is cheap. Clarissa Onslowe, ruined and exiled from her family, with nothing more to lose, seeks a rich protector. Disillusioned lawyer Allen Pendale entertains himself on the long voyage teaching the enthusiastic Miss Onslowe the arts of seduction.

He doesn’t expect to fall in love with her.

And Clarissa falls for the man who can meet her price but can’t return her affections because he loves someone else–Allen.

Q and A

Jane Lockwood is the pen name of an award-winning, multi-published writer of historical romance.

Have you always written “hot”?

Yes.

What else do you like to do?

I like to tear thrusting, urgent weeds from the garden, and wrap my tongue around succulent foodstuffs that I may or may not have cooked.

What do you like to read?

My favorite books are Wives and Daughters by Mrs. Gaskell, Villette by Charlotte Bronte, Daniel Deronda by George Eliot, and Emma by Jane Austen. I also like Nick Hornby, Anna Maxted, Sarah Waters, Pam Rosenthal, Jude Morgan, Terry Pratchett, Jennifer Weiner, and Angela Carter.

That picture isn’t really you, is it?

Sadly, no. It’s the Hon. Mrs. Charlotte Dillon by Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun, courtesy of batguano.com.

The Story Behind The Story

I first became interested in the English abolitionist movement when I read Adam Hochschild’s brilliant book Bury The Chains. This, I thought, would make a terrific novel–ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances and challenged to think, and act, above and beyond their own concerns. I also found the idea of earnest Quakers collecting signatures for petitions in bad weather extraordinarily sexy.

My editor didn’t.

Set it in the Caribbean, she said. (I’d been toying with the idea of Dartmoor for the grand denoument of the book). I didn’t actually have any Quakers in the book, just a disillusioned lawyer and a women who’d been seduced and ruined by a sweet-talking abolitionist. (Or maybe she was the sweet-talking abolitionist. Neither of them really knew what they were doing.)

So I gritted my teeth and did some emergency research.

I was thrilled that the book was published in 2007, the 200th anniversary of the Act of Parliament that ended the slave trade in Britain.