I've known fellow author Lisabet Sarai for years, and I'm delighted to celebrate the release of her newest book, The Ruination of Ramona Stone. As someone who loves Victorian romance, I was especially intrigued by this story of forbidden love, courage, and the price of following your heart. I've always known Lisabet as someone who writes with care, imagination, honesty, and courage.
Today, Lisabet joins us to share her lifelong fascination with the Victorian era and why she chose it as the setting for her first full-length lesbian romance. Please welcome her!
The Ruination of Ramona Stone
They were childhood friends reunited by tragedy. Behind closed doors, they were each other’s undoing.
Sometimes I think I lived a past life in the Victorian age. Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been drawn to architecture and costumes from the period. My siblings used to tease me about how much I liked “gingerbread” houses. In my high school yearbook picture, I’m wearing a high-necked, 1880’s style blouse with an antique cameo brooch at my throat. I’ve been a huge fan of Gilbert and Sullivan – the consummate chroniclers of Victorian culture - since I was introduced to their operettas at age five. I had devoured the complete Sherlock Holmes before I turned fifteen, not to mention other classics from the era by Wilkie Collins, H. Rider Haggard and of course Charles Dickens.
Possibly due to all the nineteenth century fiction I’ve consumed, I find it surprisingly easy to write dialogue and description that can pass as Victorian. I certainly can’t produce the same level of authenticity for any other historical era.
Over my two and a half decade career, I’ve written a number of tales that take place during Queen Victoria’s reign. My erotic romance Miranda’s Masks features a parallel plot that unfolds in late-nineteenth-century Boston. I’ve also penned a number of steam punk books, all set in an alternative Victorian world with more advanced technology than actually existed (although in fact the latter half of the eighteen hundreds was a hotbed of invention and entrepreneurship). If you like the steampunk genre, check out my Toymakers Guild series or my alt-Victorian novel set in British India, Rajasthani Moon.
The Ruination of Ramona Stone is my first attempt at a realistic novel set in the period. My two heroines fall desperately in love, violating every rule of Victorian society. They understand the price they will pay, should anyone discover their secret passion, but they risk everything to stay together.
It might seem strange that I’m so attracted to things Victorian. Given my interest in sexuality (both literary and personal), I probably would have had difficulty adapting to the prudish societal norms of the time. Of course, perennially popular Victorian erotica like The Pearl and My Secret Life suggest that there was a quite a gap between what people professed in public and what they did in private (or in the company of like-minded libertines).
That’s my theory, anyway: that the Victorians were a far lustier group than they pretended. That’s certainly true of the characters in my Victorian-themed stories.
The Way It Was
I read quite a lot of LGBTQ+ romance and erotica. Although people who are not completely straight still face discrimination, harassment, even imprisonment in some cultures, the world as a whole seems to have become much more tolerant of diverse sexual orientations. The romance genre, especially, reflects this shift in society. In many of the FF and MM stories I read, same-sex couples have become commonplace and are viewed as completely normal. I personally love to read LGBTQ+ stories where the main conflict is not about hiding versus revealing sexual orientation but something more emotionally fundamental.
The world wasn’t always this way, though. In the past – as recently as the nineteen sixties in the U.S. – gay and lesbian people were persecuted, both legally and socially. To stay safe, you needed to stay in the closet. Go back a century and half to nineteenth century England and you’ll find that sodomy was a capital felony, potentially punishable by death, and any sort of “indecency” between men could land the participants in prison. While sex between women was not explicitly criminalized (supposedly because no one wanted to admit that women experienced erotic desire), it was still viewed as deviant, obscene and an affront to God.
Of course, legal or societal sanctions don’t change what people want. Throughout history there have been LGBTQ+ relationships, despite the consequences. Patriarchal cultures deny women any agency, insisting they should be subject to their husbands, but love will find a way to express itself despite the obstacles.
My new lesbian romance, The Ruination of Ramona Stone, explores this truth. When two woman who are childhood friends fall in love, they face obstacles that might seem extreme by modern standards. Men make the rules. Women who break those rules do so at tremendous personal risk.
The novel is nothing like the tolerant contemporary lesbian romance I often consume. Loving another woman is dangerous. Ramona might not end up in jail, but she can be stripped of her financial security, forcibly separated from her child and expelled from proper society.
One reason I wrote this book is that I wanted to remind readers how fortunate we are today, at least by comparison to the past. It’s painful to experience the trials faced by Ramona and Juliet—and inspiring, I hope, to see how their love triumphs despite the hostile forces ranged against them.
Just remember—in their times, it took patience, cleverness and courage for two women in love to find a happy ending.