Q&A: Sherry Thomas

Sherry Thomas's first novel, Private Arrangements (see review, p. 87), a story of love betrayed and love delayed, is a sensual Victorian romance that reveals a sophistication and purity of language and character well beyond a debut effort. Find out how a woman who immigrated to this country as a young girl managed to pull it off.

Tell us a little of your background.

My family was a bit different. We were a clan of southerners in Northern China, and my grandmother used to do the crossword puzzles in China's official English-language newspaper—which nobody else's grandma did!

Both of my grandparents had attended Shanghai colleges where all instruction was in English. Two of my grandfather's siblings immigrated to the United States in the 1930s and 1940s. One great aunt, who was an anesthesiologist, sponsored several of her nieces and nephews to come to the States as students in the hope that they would find a better future here.

My mother landed in the States in 1984—a decision that still astonishes me, looking back, because the United States had seemed as far away as the moon. I joined her in 1988, when I was 13, after my grandmother passed away.

You learned English by reading romance novels. How did that come about? Which authors were your favorites?

My first reading materials in English were primers from my English as a second language class, which made me feel very childish—I'd been reading classical literature in Chinese, and here I was laboriously making my way through two-paragraph stories about little kids and little dogs. So as soon as I could, I went after more grown-up stuff.

I think I fell upon romance novels because they were widely available and because I was of an age to be curious about what happens between a man and a woman beyond looking at each other across a room (which, back then in China, was all we kids could and dared do).

My favorite in those days was definitely Rosemary Rogers, whose tales of passion and danger were terrific brain candy—and I was quite surprised later to discover that the hero and the heroine in a romance weren't required to hate each other for 600 pages running. (Laughs)

Why did you choose to set your novel in late Victorian England? Did the plot dictate the setting or vice versa?

England is always a good setting for a romance because, as a friend of mine once analyzed, England is an indubitably masculine place, which provides a perfect contrasting backdrop to a story about romantic love.

I fell in love with the turn-of-the-century setting when I discovered Laura Kinsale and Judith Ivory. I adore that it was a time of tremendous advances in scientific understanding and technological capability—in Private Arrangements, for example, there is an automobile—and yet people still lived under a formality that is exotic and almost incomprehensible to us here in 21st-century America. That formality sets off a wonderful tension for a writer to explore the sexual charge in a look, a word, a hand held a fraction too long.

You could have chosen a somewhat "easier" route than such a complex and mature subject (the couple is seeking a divorce after years of estrangement). Were you ever uncertain of how you would bring it all together?

I don't believe in "easy" routes to happiness, at least not for fiction. I write complex situations with no pat solutions because they are what interest me as a reader: hard choices and what people do in the face of such hard choices. I am a seat-of-the-pants writer, so I'm always uncertain how I'll bring it together. In the end, the characters themselves must have the strength and maturity to choose the right path.

Your next book is called Delicious. Tell us a little bit about that. Is it another historical romance?

It is, again, set in turn-of-the-century England, about a gentleman who has everything going for him—fabulous legal and political careers, a beautiful fiancée, a lovely country seat—who falls in love with the infamous cook he inherits from his brother. I know it doesn't sound like it, but Delicious is my take on the Cinderella story. Dark fairy tales, anyone?