Susanna here, pursued by my deadlines at the moment, so I missed out on contributing to Nicola’s lovely AAW post this week about old and new favourites (for the record, I would also have put Mary Stewart at the top of my list).
But in reading through the equally lovely comments I came across the interchange between Kareni and Nicola, about books that are passed down with love to the next generation of readers—“Inheritance books”, Nicola called them, and suggested it might be a topic somebody could blog on in a future post.
This isn’t that post.
But it is a post about one such book, passed down with love from my mother to me, and what happened because of it.
She still remembers details of that day, and how she felt. She loved the story so much that she searched it out at her local library, but of course had to return it after reading it. It took her a number of years before she finally found a copy she could buy (it’s still on her shelf).
In winter in my part of Canada by the time I would get home from school at four o’clock it was already growing dark—that cold and snowy dark that wraps around you and makes you dive under a blanket and reach for a book in the warm, cozy light of your bedroom. I still hear the wind blowing fierce at my windows. I still, with my eyes closed, can picture the heroine standing against a dark sky of her own, as the story began to unfold.
“The dawn was slow in coming. Against the pale sky the mountains were tall and sullen, holding back the day. An uneasy wind stirred in the black trees by the loch and moaned restlessly through the castle parapets, but in the high upland corries there was only the silence of night.”
It was love at first read.
Like my mother, I went on to read (and to buy my own copies of) two more historical Jan Cox Speas novels: My Lord Monleigh and My Love My Enemy. My mother’s were original hardcovers—mine are the paperbacks re-issued in the 1970s by Avon, with what I think might be the same male cover model playing all three heroes on the front.
And years later, when I was published myself and creating my website, I put up a list of my own favourite authors, with brief biographical notes on them.
I couldn’t find much about Jan Cox Speas. So I noted that right on my website, and asked any readers who knew more about her to please get in touch.
A year later, one did. “Hi Susanna,” her email began, “I’m Jan’s daughter.”
And that’s how I came to meet Cynthia (Cindy) Speas. She filled me in on the details of her mother’s life, with enough information (and photos!) to let me create a full page on my website.
But better than that, when I travelled to Washington, DC, later that year for the RWA National conference, she came to pick me up at the airport. She drove me all over the city, while we searched for locations for one of my characters. She was my “date” for the RITA awards ceremony, in which my book The Winter Sea was nominated (for Best Novel with Romantic Elements—it lost to Nora Roberts). And she invited me home with her, where on her own shelves she showed me the row of original hardcover Georgette Heyer novels that she and her mother had collected.
Her “inheritance books”, if you like—an enduring and memory-filled link to the mother she’d lost far too soon.
We’ve stayed friends, and the best part for me of a trip to the Washington region is getting the chance to spend more time with Cindy.
I love that it was one book, and our mothers, that connected us.
And while my sons are maybe not the audience for Bride of the MacHugh, I pass that book along to everyone I can.
A book that can connect you at the same time to the people who have read and loved it before you, and also to the friends you haven’t met yet it will one day bring into your life, is in my view a thing to treasure.
Have you ever had a book passed down to you this way? Or have you ever, like Cindy and her mother, shared the fun of collecting an author’s complete works? Have books ever led you to new friends? What are your "inheritance books"?