An Earl In Want Of A Wife. Laura Martin

       Author Note

      I started to write An Earl in Want of a Wife when I was heavily pregnant, and when I was planning this book my mind was taken up with all things to do with children. In this day and age in our society it does not much matter if your parents are married or not when you’re born, but with motherhood looming I got to thinking about families in Regency England. I realised that illegitimacy had far-reaching consequences for those living a couple of hundred years ago, and a man with an illegitimate child would have had many difficult decisions to make. With all this in my mind Daniel, a gentleman agonising over such decisions, was born.

      As Daniel’s character developed I realised he needed a very special woman to help him overcome not only the harsh judgements of society but also his own sometimes misguided ideas about fatherhood. Lizzie is that woman. She is the quintessential ugly duckling, but throughout the book she blossoms into a confident young woman. When writing An Earl in Want of a Wife I was infused with the sentimentality of pregnancy, and I wanted her to find her happy ending just as I would my own child.