From the Author
For the Love of Lila was a lot of fun for me to write. I particularly enjoyed playing on the gender role reversal between Lila and Tristan. Normally, in that time period, women had to be very careful about their reputations, while men had much more leeway. In this case, Lila doesn't care what society thinks of her, but Tristan aspires to a political career, so he has to be concerned about his good name. This sets up some funny scenes.
The book was inspired in part by details I've read about Mary Shelley's life. Shelley has always fascinated me from both a literary and a biographical standpoint. Her mother was a pioneer feminist, her father a renown philosopher, and her husband a celebrated poet — plus she wrote Frankenstein at the tender age of nineteen! In Lila, the heroine is a woman writer of the same era, one with some interesting feminist ideas of her own.
All in all, this book is very close to my heart. Lila and Tristan have tremendous reasons to be attracted and just as strong reasons to try to stay apart. In rereading the story recently, I still felt their longings and their frustration — and that meant a lot to me. When you've spent a couple of years writing and editing a story, it's sometimes hard to see the "big picture" in it anymore.
About the Author
As an English major in college, Jennifer Malin once tried to limit her reading to literary works. Then one evening her mother lent her a Regency romance that tantalized her. She stayed up all night reading, and by the end of the story she was hooked on the genre. Not long after, she began her first attempt at writing a novel herself, jotting down the story on notebook pages and scraps of paper between classes and during breaks from work. She soon began pursuing writing more seriously and switched to a computer!
In 1994, Romance Writers of America awarded her manuscript Lord St. Leger's Find the Golden Heart for Best Regency. Her first published book, As You Wish, a Jove Time Passages romance, appeared in 1999, and her second, Eternally Yours, helped launch Jove's Love Letters line in January 2002. For the Love of Lila is her first Leisure Book. She credits what success she has had to persistence, practice and helpful critique from peers.
Jennifer makes her home in the Philadelphia area with her husband, Martin, an Australian national. The two share a love of music, movies and travel. Together they attend a very social book group, discussing works of all genres with enthusiastic friends.
