I first started reading Julianne MacLean roughly a year ago when her book An Affair Most Wicked was selected for our Book of the Month club. Being the type of reader that does not stray to a middle of series I picked up her previous novel To Marry The Duke. While I enjoyed the book I found her writing style to be different. Maybe its because she does not feel the need to include a “villain” in every story that she writes and come to think of it, not one of her stories that I have read to date carries the tell tale sign of a person beyond redemption and pure evil. Rather they are excluded or insignificant, deemed not important to character growth between the heroine and hero. While at first I missed it, I discovered it was the main thing that attracted me to her writing, the absence of one and writing a book on human emotion.
Julianne’s writing style did intrigue me. It was fresh, it was innovative and even though To Marry The Duke did not really leave any long lasting effects in this reader’s mind, I went on ahead and read the other two books in her America Heiress Series, An Affair Most Wicked and My Own Private Hero. Something I am glad I did or I would have been missing out on one great storyteller. Julianne MacLean’s writing style does remind me of Lynn Kurland with her characters and emotional growth, but the similarity between the authors ends there. Julianne writes intense sensual love scenes where you can feel each caress and kiss made, while Lynn Kurland opts to leave those scenes from her novels and gives an illusion to the reader that it happened. With Julianne there is no illusion. It’s in black and white steaming up her pages and her characters, making each author different from each other for very obvious reasons.
Overall the series is great, she is the first author that I have read that incorporated the insurgence of American Brides traveling to England to snare a titled man way back in the day. Her three books in this series tell the tales of three sisters, who started from humble beginnings until their father struck the “jackpot” in the stock market and moved his family to New York to mingle and live amongst the “rich and elite”. That not being enough, their ever-aspiring mother demanded the best for their daughters when it came to Husbands. So titled English men it was, off one by one they traveled to England to arrange the best matches possible.
According to the author in her blurb in the back of To Marry The Duke, she always wanted to write about American Heiresses looking for aristocratic English husbands, after reading about Edward VIII, who abdicated his throne in England for the woman he loved, Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. We all know the story. It is one of the most romantic stories with a fairy tale ending to date. Their passionate romance and struggle for acceptance is and was well documented. In the end a King made a decision to give everything he had up for love. True Romance!
She later firmed up her resolve to write about this time after she read The Buccaneers, by Edith Wharton. It is based on four American girls who evade English society in the late Victorian period. While to her it was fascinating to read, it also delved into a darker side of this story where American girls gave up their home and country for a life of loneliness, married to strangers who never truly accepted them and married them for their money.
Her characters are based on nobility in England and follow the social structure for men, and her females are based on American ladies that managed to snare a titled peer. In total she goes on to relate in this blurb that between the period of 1870 and 1914 approximately 100 American woman traveled to England, six of these women set their sights very high and nabbed themselves Dukes, a title considered to be the crème de la crème in English Society. These women were the glamour icons in this period and you can read about their life in the book In A Gilded Cage, by Marian Fowler.
Not only that, she further goes on to explain in her novel An Affair Most Wicked that the Late Princess Diana’s great-grandmother was an American Heiress. In 1880 Frances Work of Newport married the Honourable James Burke-Roche, younger brother of an Irish Baron. He traveled to America and spent time in Wyoming raising cattle before meeting the woman of his dreams, a beautiful and very rich daughter of a Vanderbilt stockbroker. They later married and returned back to England and gave birth to twin sons. One of them was Princess Diana’s grandfather.
Another name in history that has an American Heiress in their geology chart is Winston Churchill. His mother Jennie Jerome married Lord Randolph Churchill the seventh Duke of Marlborough in 1847. She was only 19 years old and he proposed to her 3 days after meeting her onboard a cruise ship, at a ball held in the Honour of The Prince and Princess of Wales. While he died in 1895, Jennie married two more times and devoted her life to her son’s political career. On a side note, Jennie also had two sisters, Clara and Leonie who also married into titles and their story can be read in the book titled To Marry An English Lord, by Gail MacColl and Carol McD.
The most notable example of a foreign heiress coming to England to marry a title would be Consuelo Vanderbilt who married the ninth Duke of Marlborough. She penned a novel about her life titled The Glitter and The Gold. In it she goes into detail about the heartbreaks and hardships as a young lady doing her duty to her family and marrying into the British Aristocracy. Julianne will tell you that Sophia, although she is fictitious, had much in common with Consuelo and of the loneliness she felt once she entered into her “dream marriage”.
With so much real history to chose from and base her stories on, it’s really easy to see why Julianne MacLean chose the route she did with these novels. I’m sure though that in real life these woman faced a lot of scorn, speculation and put-downs from the upper crust in England, mainly from the mothers that wanted their English daughters to marry titled men. Also at this time, the social standing in America when new money and the stock market was taking a foothold and gaining with incredible success set the Upper Crust in America on its proverbial rear end. Old money vs. New money in America to this day is much talked about and the social structures that follow remain intact. It’s a wonder that these women were able to come as far as they did with two opposing societies looking down their noses at them.
So just how exactly did Julianne MacLean become a well-known author in the romance genre? According to her website, she will openly admit that she had no desire to submerse herself into the romance world. She holds a degree in English Literature and it was not until a study in 19th century novels when she fell in love with some of the greatest classics, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice and a novel given to her by her cousin to lighten her reading load titled Dawnfire by Lynn Erickson, did she truly become hooked.
After she finished her degree in English Literature she went on to also earn her degree in Business Administration and worked for a time as an Auditor for the Canadian Government while she worked to finish her degree in Accounting to become a Chartered Accountant. However, she was not cut out to be an Accountant, and her writing started to come to the forefront around this time. Weighing the pros and cons of corporate tax and being a writer, it was Jo Beverley who silently and unknowingly supported and helped her make her final decision when she was watching a call-in show with the author. Jo Beverley at the time was President for The Romance Writers in Canada and Julianne immediately called the number on the screen and that’s when it all began-her journey and her education to becoming published.
After quitting her job, she invested many years in she actively pursued her dream of writing and sold her first novel in 1999 to Harlequin titled Prairie Bride. Since then she’s gone on to publish five other novels, the latest being My Own Private Hero. When she researches a novel she tries to stick to a historically accurate setting without bogging down the novel. Mainly, her female characters are strong, emotionally intelligent and calm even when times are tough. A perfect example would be Sophia from To Marry The Duke. Although she knew that her husband deep down loved her he was emotionally detached; a wife was a duty to him, a possession. Sophia was having none of that. Instead of resorting to trickery to make her husband love her, she adapted herself to the situation, slowly allowing him to let his guard down, making him desire her and want to share his life with her.
She likes to write about dark, tortured men, the ones that carry scars. They will and do require a substantial growth period in these novels, most notably James, but Damien underwent a transformation in his novel My Own Private Hero where he learned that mistakes from his past would only affect his future if he allowed them to. He opened his mind and heart to love; one emotion he always thought would elude him. When it comes to heroes some of her favourite heroes from other authors include Rothgar from Devilish by Jo Beverley and Devon Crandall from The Windflower by Sharon and Tom Curtis.
When she is not writing or researching her latest novel she likes to spend quality family time with her husband and daughter. She resides in the beautiful province of Nova Scotia in Canada, and makes red wine with her cousin. Some of her favourite movies would likely include the following: The Notebook, Last of The Mochicans and Serendipity. In music, she used to DJ in university and will always maintain a healthy love for 80’s music but also enjoys listening to Sarah McLachlan and The Rolling Stones. As for books, I have scattered her favourites in and amongst this spotlight, with Edith Wharton and Charlotte Bronte high up on the list for classics but Jo Beverley and Mary Balogh are the front-runners in the romance genre. Ed Harris and Johnny Depp are amongst her list of favourite actors, leading me to wonder as a reader if she patterns characters from actors in her stories and if so, which one is Johnny. That’s something I will be sure to ask her in the chat we are having with her on January 24th at 8 pm EST. I hope that you are able to join us.
I hope you enjoyed the spotlight on this intriguing author and the little history lesson on American Heiresses who married into the British Aristocracy.
Mention of the History and Lives of the American Heiress’s and subsequent books taken from the Authors After word in To Marry The Duke, An Affair Most Wicked and My Own Private Hero. Bibliographical information taken from the authors website.