Warm Sundays remind me of being a teenager and days and weeks abandoned to the pleasures of ‘Jane Eyre’, ‘Rebecca’, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Wuthering Heights’, ‘Emma’. I still remember the feeling of discovering those books for the first time. The shock of Mr Rochester’s deception, the passionate cries of Cathy ‘I am Heathcliff‘. This wasn’t melodrama, this was romance and I read without irony or laughter, longing for a Heathcliff of my own. While writing ‘The Novel in the Viola’ I wanted to create that sensation in a reader again. We might now know better but I hope I can remind the reader of those seemingly endless summers when we fell in love for the first time with Darcy, Knightley, Max De Winter and Mr Rochester.

These tulips were a gift from my friend Mrs D, in San Francisco. She asked me to plant them in my garden and remember the afternoon Mr S and I spent them. The story Mrs D told me that afternoon inspired some of Mr R. You can read about that here.