Susanna here.
Nearly a full decade ago, whilst puddling about on the internet when I should have been writing, I happened upon a lighthearted post by Lynne Connolly at the Historical and Regency Romance UK blog titled: “Create Your Own Regency Romance”, listing various scenarios and options for the would-be writer.
While some of the options were more inspired than others, I confess it was the fifth option for where the hero and heroine might first make love that I found most amusing:
“In his library where she has gone in the middle of the night, barefoot, in search of a book to read. He is already there in his shirtsleeves, drinking.”
Even while smiling, I couldn’t help wanting to read that scene. Heck, I suspected I’d written that scene. Maybe not in the Regency, but even so...
Because I have a weakness for heroes who read.
And heroes in libraries frequently find their way into my books.
He pushed open a heavy, creaking door and led me into another passage, where the air was heavy with the glorious scent of leather. I had often dreamt of rooms filled with nothing but books, but I had never actually seen one, and so the first sight of Richard de Mornay’s library left me momentarily speechless.
‘These are all yours?’ I asked in wonder, my eyes raking row upon row of the handsomely bound volumes, and he laughed at the unbridled envy on my face.
‘Ay. One day I will build a larger room for them, but for now this must suffice. You may borrow whatever you like.’
In my later novel, The Winter Sea, a library again connected heroine and hero, this time when they were apart from one another:
Her appetite was small but still she ate, and after eating sought a warmly sunlit corner of the library, to pass the morning reading.
She could draw some sense of shared communion, sitting here where Moray had so often sought escape from his forced inactivity at Slains, and feeling in her hands the smooth expensive leather bindings of the books he had so loved to read.
And one book, out of all of them, could draw her to a stronger feeling of connection to him, as though Moray’s voice were speaking out the words. It was a newer volume, plainly bound, of Dryden’s King Arthur, or the British Worthy. The pages were so slightly used she doubted whether anyone but Moray and herself had read the lines, and she was only sure that he had read them because in the letter he had left her—in that simple letter, with its sentiments so strong and sure that every night, on reading them, they banished all her worries—he had quoted from this very work of Dryden’s, and the verse, writ in his own bold hand, stayed with her as though he himself had spoken it:
‘Where’e’er I go, my Soul shall stay with thee:
’Tis but my Shadow that I take away;’She read it over now, and touched the book’s page with her fingers as though somehow that could bring him close.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even require a full library. In A Desperate Fortune, a room with one small bookcase in it was enough to make my heroine view the hero in a different light:
Mr. MacPherson appeared as content as a man of his nature could be with his solitude, because when Mary had taken Frisque briefly outdoors and come in again, passing the door to the drawing room on her way up to her chamber, she noticed the Scotsman had settled himself in the chair she’d abandoned, his pipe laid aside and a book in his hand.
He remained in that chair throughout most of the next day.
She found it distinctly unnerving, him sitting there reading. At first she had found it amusing to see he’d been reading the book she had set down herself when she’d started to listen to Thomson: Madame d’Aulnoy’s Hippolytus, with its sensational string of adventures, professions of love, and a hero who wore his emotion so openly when with the heroine that in the space of a few pages he’d gone from “bathing her cheeks with his tears” to embracing her, to—when their parting was imminent—throwing himself at her feet. Mary tried to imagine Mr. MacPherson throwing himself at any woman’s feet, and failed.
And yet, he seemed to find the novel passable enough, for when he’d finished it just after breakfast he had set it down where he had found it, risen briefly from his chair to search the bookshelf by the fireplace, and resumed his seat with Madame d’Aulnoy’s Travels into Spain, ignoring everything and everyone within the drawing room…
He looked less fearsome, reading. With his gaze turned downward it had not the piercing steadiness that hardened all his features; and his mouth, although still crooked and uneven at its corners, was not set into its stricter lines. He looked almost . . . approachable, she thought.
So I suppose I’ll always be in sympathy with heroines who wander into libraries in novels in the middle of the night. Because, even without the drink, there’s definitely something about heroes sitting in their shirtsleeves, reading.
What do you think? Do you have any favourite scenes—lovemaking or otherwise—that happen in libraries? Any favourite book-loving heroes?