A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
Romantic fiction, in the broader sense, can be any novel that has a love story somewhere in it. It can be a mystery or a historical novel, as long as it has this very strong romantic thread running through it. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
When you say that you write romantic fiction, there are a lot of people who have an image in their mind of the ‘bodice ripper.’ It’s the one term that most romantic fiction writers absolutely hate because it has no bearing on what people are writing. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
How much of our lives is consumed with meeting people, attracting people, keeping people and missing people? Usually, when everything is resolved romantically in one of my books, the characters stop talking in my head, and I stop telling the story. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
I grew up in a very small town where nearly everyone knew each other, and odds were that whatever you said about a person would make it back to them by nightfall – something incomers learned, to their frequent embarrassment. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
After the loss of my sister – my darkest time – I tried to think of the beauty she’d brought to this world and the lives she had touched and the love she had left behind. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
I can have my day carefully planned, but if someone wakes up with a cough or a sniffle, then everything changes. Thinking quickly and adapting without grumbling are essential skills to learn, in my opinion. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
When I’m dealing with the 18th century, as I do in ‘The Firebird,’ the difficulty isn’t only finding what a woman did, it’s finding her at all. Most of the sources I’m dealing with – letters and memoirs and written reports of the day – have been written by men. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
One of the more interesting challenges I face when doing research for my novels is to trace the lives of women who are vital to the narrative and try my best to give them back their voices. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
Such is the endless dilemma of dialect. Not every reader will ever agree with the way that I handle it, no matter how hard I work to keep everything readable. But again it’s that balance I have to maintain between keeping it easy and keeping it real, and I know that I’ll never please everyone. Susanna Kearsley Read Quote
