A Lady At Last has a very personal meaning for me. A year and a half ago my sister died at the age of forty. My answer to grief was to bury myself in work and A Lady At Last was the result. I did not realize what I was doing at the time, but when I had finished Amanda’s story, I was stunned to realize the parallels between her life and my sister’s.

My sister was bi-polar. No doctor could ever correct the chemical imbalance in her brain, and she tried different combos of meds for years—and always wound up self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. She had a terrible life, filled with physical and emotional pain (in her last years she lived with bullet in her back). There was no joy, no happiness—none. It was a bleak, anguished existence—every day was spent in misery. She was deprived of the kind of life that you and I take for granted.

I have never done a heroine like Amanda before—a young woman deprived of a “normal” life. I didn’t understand why I was doing such a cliched heroine—a pirate’s daughter—but my heroine had to come from a bleak existence. Amanda has a father who is rarely there, she has to beg and steal to survive when he is gone for months on end, and when her father is present, a cuff to the head is the norm. And then the hero appears to rescue her from a vicious, hateful mob at her father’s hanging.

And Cliff becomes enchanted with Amanda, not just because of her beauty, but because of her courage and spirit in the face of the life she’s had, a life that would have beaten other young women down. He realizes she has been deprived of the kind of life she deserved. Her mother is a noblewoman living a life of privilege in London, and it infuriates him that Amanda was cast aside and raised as she was. Cliff becomes determined to secure Amanda’s future—he will make certain she has the kind of life she deserves.

Amanda had a happy ending, my sister did not. No hero appeared to rescue my sister—no hero could.

A Lady At Last is, on the surface, a Cinderella story. But as you can see, for me, it is far more than that.

Regards,