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In the Grasp of Romance: My Life as Fiona Hill

By Ellen Pall

I read my first historical romance in a fog composed of equal parts Darvon and pain. I was 20 years old, a junior in college, and I had just had my wisdom teeth removed. Realizing I’d be too woozy to read my assigned Keats and Coleridge, I had plucked the book at random from a rack of paperbacks at the drugstore; propped up on three pillows, I opened it hopefully. It was wonderful. The story chiefly concerned monks hiding treasures during the English Reformation. The facts weren’t particularly accurate, but you could cut the atmosphere with a broadsword, and the plot was so intricate that as my head cleared, my admiration grew for the author, who was about to resolve what appeared to me to be a truly insoluble mystery. Then, a scant 10 pages from the end, she introduced a mute, illiterate giant. It was he, we were told, who had moved the enormous coffers intact from Point A to Point B, yet ever afterwards (perforce) kept mum. Finis. I sat up in bed, indignant at this parachute jump on an ending, sputtering around the cotton in my cheeks, “This? This!” And then, prophetic words of contempt: “I can do this.”

A year later I graduated. My father, after supporting me without complaint for 21 years, politely inquired how I was planning to earn my living. Living? I had always intended to write novels. I dared, blushing, to stammer out this ambition. My father smiled a smile of amusement, skepticism, irritation and tolerance. As scientist, he proposed (after some discussion) an experiment. He would keep me afloat for six months while I worked part time and use my off hours to take a shot at writing a book. I left feeling pleased, but soon realized six months was hardly enough time to conceive, let alone write and sell, a serious novel. Then I remembered the monks. Suppose I sold a historical novel? Might not such a demonstration of ability inspire this kindly, scientific, art-patronizing father to run the experiment again with, say, a full year of literary freedom? I had studied English and French. I could set my book in London during the Napoleonic wars. I had begun to read up on Wellington and make lists of calamities to feed the plot when a friend, hearing what I was up to, brought me a stack of yellowing Regency romances by Georgette Heyer.

Regency romances are a sunny and compact genre in which a lady and a gentleman meet, form indifferent opinions of each other, banter for 200 pages or so, kiss and agree to marry. They take place in the better drawing rooms of England and are written in a dense, slang-ridden version of the diction of their period, the years from 1811 to 1820 when the Prince regent, the future George IV, reigned in place of his mad father—the eponymous Regency. Relaxed and confident, happy with the way things are, their protagonists are not concerned with love. Yet somehow, behind their backs, unexpected, unwanted, perceived—if at all—as a kind of discomfort, affection creeps up, to the surprise of everyone involved. As much comedy as romance, a Regency makes its tickling assault on the imagination, not the senses. Even the explicit articulation of tenderness (“But my dear girl, I love you!”) comes so late in the book as almost not to get in. The unnoticed mutual seduction of the principals occurs inadvertently, through words—a ravishment by wit.

The cheerful effortlessness of this appealed to me, especially compared with the grim determination of my own real-life romances. As a child of the 60’s (anyone who came of age in that athletic and exhausting decade will understand) I found the notion of being talked into love singularly charming. I often tell people who have confused Regencies with another genre that there is no sex in them; in fact, sexual excitement is implicit in them everywhere, but the organs of delight are the listening ear, the fluently speaking lips. Consummation is a kiss, the surrender of mouth that symbolizes the commingling of thoughts.

Georgette Heyer wrote the ur-Regency, “The Convenient Marriage,” in 1934. In 1973, when I first encountered her, the author Clare Darcy was to my knowledge her only imitator. I read Heyer at first doubtfully (her prose, rich with anachronism and frantic with circumlocution, is as curious and oblique as a Double-Crostic), but soon with enthusiasm. Despite their burden of diction, her books were both elegant and sprightly. I revised my plans.

After I’d read a dozen or so Georgette Heyers, I reread two novelists of the period, Jane Austen and Fanny Burney. I began to keep a file of characteristic vocabulary (society: monde, ton) of the era. I pored over social and political histories, studied the way to address earls and the etiquette of duels (if wounded, remain calm, preserve dignity and submit to surgeon). I had no trouble sitting at a typewriter creating banter; one of my more excruciating childhood memories is of being discovered, by my older brother, happily chatting things over with the bathroom mirror. Scads of banter: When I looked carefully at Georgette Heyer, I discovered passages of dialogue that went on for 20 pages. Twenty pages of a lady and a gentleman saying not much to each other on the subject of so little that the whole became sort of conversational soufflé.

“Property and propriety,” says Lord Marchmont, one of my cynical heroes; “the two great pros of marriage.”

“Allow me to mention progeny, my lord,” says his wife to be, and to suggest it is your convenience which is disturbed.”

Banter is the Ping-Pong of debate.

I had read that George Sand wrote seven pages a day exactly. I made this my goal. In five months the manuscript was done. I titled it “The Pleached Alley,” signed it Adrienne Brooke—saving my real name for my serious work—and sent it off to the boy who had taken me to my high school junior prom, now a literary agent in New York. He sold it within a couple of weeks. The publishers retitled it “The Trellised Lane,” demanded a friendlier-sounding pseudonym (they suggested Heather Leigh; I chose Fiona Hill in hopes I’d be shelved alphabetically between Heyer and the immensely popular Victoria Holt), stuck a cigarette ad in the middle, misprinted “father” as “fater” on page one, wrapped it in perky Kelly-green soft covers and put it on the market.

It was then that I learned how little I had understood my fater. Far from being moved to extend his literary patronage, he proudly, briskly, firmly and finally congratulated me on my good fortune in entering so congenial a profession, wished me luck and considered our joint experiment complete.

At the same time, both my agent and my editor encouraged me to write another Fiona Hill. “One book is nothing,” said my former prom date, to my dismay. “Write two or three and you’ll have a name, something solid to fall back on." I was flattered, and all too susceptible to the idea that I might one day need “something solid to fall back on.” I signed to write another. And another.

* * *

Soon—alarmingly soon—writing Regencies was the only thing I really knew how to do. I continued to read Dostoyevsky and Proust, Forster, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor. I began to try, between contracts, to write nongenre novels. But 50 or 60 pages in, I would run out of money or confidence. And always, when I faltered, Fiona would be waiting: cheerful, calm, competent—a little pushy, it soon began to seem to me—certainly ready to take over any time.

My troubles were compounded by the fact that the Regency formula is an unusually rigid one. By the time I had published four books as Fiona I was wildly bored. To amuse myself, I dug up extinct word games and put them into the mouths of my characters. I had them tell stories within the story. I wrote a partly epistolary book. Meanwhile, the genre flourished. I was promoted from paperback to hardcover; this meant my manuscripts had to be twice as long. Feeling like the girl in “Rumpelstiltskin”—whose reward for having spun a room full of straw into gold was a larger room full of straw—I wrote on. I added mystery subplots. I slipped minor figures from early books into later ones. I caricatured my friends. Yet the formula closed around me like a boa constrictor.

It took me 10 years, in the end, to wriggle out of that grasp; but my first novel under my own name, when it appeared, was issued by a very proper literary publisher. It attracted respectful attention and won me a fellowship to a venerable writers’ conference, where I met other novelists whose interest in my work gradually changed my writing life forever. Fiona Hill was a secret there. When, invited back to teach two years later, I attempted to reveal her, I found she was as politely, as resolutely, ignored as would have been a prosthetic metal hand.

“A very interesting tale,” says Fiona, perching lightly upon my desk. “But can you mean to suggest our work together is quite at an end? I protest you paint me curiously. On the one hand, I am nothing but fancy; on the other, blamable for enslaving you! Boa constrictor, forsooth!” She laughs and begins absently to wind a blank page into my typewriter. “I can scarcely say whether boa constrictors were known in England in 1811. But let us not quarrel over words. Now that I have your ear, pray allow me to mention a little plot I have long had it in mind to propose…”

- April 30, 1989, The New York Times Book Review