Suddenly You

by Lisa Kleypas

First published 2001

Amazon

2.5(5)

On her thirtieth birthday, successful novelist Amanda Briars arranges an encounter intended to change her private life, but a misunderstanding brings publisher Jack Devlin to her door. Their professional and romantic relationship develops through questions of authorship, control, secrecy and the risks of intimacy outside conventional marriage.

The novel is set in the expanding nineteenth-century publishing trade, when circulating libraries, commercial presses and a growing reading public created new opportunities for women writers. Amanda’s income gives her unusual independence, but sexual reputation and publishing power remain unevenly distributed.

Publishing also gives the relationship an economic imbalance. Amanda earns through her own writing, but Jack controls access to printing, distribution and the commercial judgement of manuscripts. Their attraction therefore develops inside negotiations over professional independence as well as sexual convention, making the romance attentive to the unusual position of a successful unmarried woman who can support herself through authorship.