New Books Network Interview: Shana Galen

Although fiction set in Regency England has expanded quite a bit since the days of Georgette Heyer, including murder mysteries by authors such as C. S. Harris and Andrea Penrose that contrast the stews of London to its drawing rooms, the historical romance genre still tends to focus on aristocrats or an Austen-like country gentry. That comment, however, does not apply to Shana Galen, whose A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord, the opener for a new series, The Heiress Hunters, features not only the son of an Irish peer but a woman who, through no fault of her own, struggles to make ends meet for herself, her twice-widowed mother, and her younger siblings, sold to a chimney sweep. Find out more from my latest New Books Network interview.

As usual, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

Romance novels—especially historical romance novels—thrive on heroes and heroines who don’t match in terms of social class. There must be conflict, after all, or the novel would end before it began. But not even George Bernard Shaw’s mismatched couple in Pygmalion (later My Fair Lady) can claim quite as much distance as Shana Galen’s Tamsin Archer and the Honourable Garret Kildare, the main characters in A Shop Girl’s Guide to Wooing a Lord (Berkley, 2026).

Tamsin’s once comfortable if never opulent life took a sharp downward turn when a Royal Navy press gang hauled her father off to unwanted service on a seagoing vessel, service from which he never returned. By 1813, when we meet her at age twenty-three, she’s doing her best to support her injured mother and two much younger siblings by selling flowers in the street. A young man named Garret speaks kindly to her and pays her a shilling when she’s expecting far less, and as a result she remembers him fondly, but it’s not until two years later that she meets him again. By then, a chimney sweep has taken her younger siblings and holds them hostage to payments she can never make and that he might not honor even if she did. She’s desperate to get them back.

In 1815, Garret’s life also makes a dramatic turn. His father, the Earl of Glenister, announces that the family has run out of money and must sell its ancestral lands in Ireland. Not exactly poverty, especially by Tamsin’s standards, but still uncomfortable. Garret and his three brothers—Liam, Killian, and Daire—make a bet that one of them will secure the hand of an heiress, thus sparing their younger sister, Mariah, from having to marry an elderly and decrepit duke. But as Garret sets out to woo his heiress, he encounters Tamsin somewhere she’s not supposed to be …