We chat with author Freya Sampson about Most Ardently Yours, which is a delightfully bookish and swoony romance with a lightly speculative flair from the USA Today bestselling author Freya Sampson that brings to life one of Jane Austen’s most universally beloved love interests.
What inspired you to write this story?
As is often the way, there were a number of different inspirations and ideas that came together at exactly the right moment to help me come up with Most Ardently Yours. I’ve always thought it would be fun to write a story where a fictional character came out of a novel to help someone, and having already written a book set in a library, I’d been toying with the idea of setting a story in a really lovely, cozy bookshop. Then one evening, a friend and I were having a conversation about our favorite book boyfriends, and suddenly all the threads came together and I knew I wanted to write a rom-com about Mr. Darcy coming out of Pride and Prejudice in a gorgeous London bookshop!
Why did you choose Pride and Prejudice and, specifically, Mr. Darcy to play such an integral role in this story? Were there ever any other book boyfriends who you considered for the story instead?
As soon as I had the idea for this story, I knew there could only be one book boyfriend I featured. Pride and Prejudice was such a seminal novel for me as a teenager, and it’s a story I’ve returned to for comfort many, many times throughout my life, both on the page and on screen. It was also helpful that it’s a novel that so many readers are familiar with, and Darcy is such an interesting, complicated character. So to be honest, I didn’t even consider anyone else!
Throughout the novel, you reference several very specific facts about Jane Austen’s work, minor details about characters in Pride and Prejudice, and even the geography of Georgian England. What did your research process look like?
Researching this novel was a lot of fun, as you can imagine. Aside from rereading Pride and Prejudice many times and rewatching the TV and film adaptations, I listened to audiobooks of Austen’s novels on repeat while I was writing to try to make Darcy’s dialogue feel as authentic as possible. I also visited Bath to learn more about Austen’s life and to get a sense of what a Georgian city might have looked and felt like to Darcy and Elizabeth.
The story shines a light on the way many romance readers are often judged for their tastes and how the genre as a whole is often overlooked. Why did you feel it was important to highlight this and push back against it?
This theme was actually really personal to me and was one of the main reasons I wanted to write this story. I’ve always adored reading romance novels, but I went to quite an old- fashioned academic school and then Cambridge University, where the genre was definitely looked down on. I vividly remember a male English teacher telling me that it was OK to read romance novels “occasionally, as light relief” but that the main focus of my reading should be literary fiction. At an impressionable age, I must have somehow internalized this ridiculous, misogynistic message because although I continued to read romance novels for pleasure, whenever I thought about writing a book myself, I always felt that I needed to write something serious and highbrow. As a result, I spent twenty years trying and failing to write a novel, crippled by imposter syndrome. It wasn’t until I was in my late thirties that I finally gave myself permission to write what I love, which was uplifting stories with love at their heart. So I was really keen to explore this issue in Zoe’s own journey as an aspiring writer and to celebrate the power and importance of romance novels.
If you had the chance to meet one of your favorite fictional characters, who would you choose and why?
So many! If I had to narrow it down, then I’d say Elizabeth Bennet, for obvious reasons, and I would also love to spend the evening with Bridget Jones. She’s such a funny, relatable character, flawed and endearing, plus I feel like I’ve grown up alongside her.
We must know… Do you have a favorite on-s creen Fitzwilliam Darcy? Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen? (Or both?)
Ohh, the million- dollar question! This may be controversial, but for me, Colin Firth will always be the man I most associate with Darcy. I watched that BBC adaptation at around the same time I first read the novel, so he and Jennifer Ehle are seared into my heart as Darcy and Elizabeth. I also think Firth captured the aloofness and brooding of Austen’s character a little better. That said, I think Matthew Macfadyen made a wonderful Darcy and brought a fantastic emotional vulnerability to the character…not to mention that hand flex!
