Influences on The Rose Throne #3: Elinor in Sense and Sensibility

Marianne is the flashier sister, the romantic, the one with the dramatic love story of Sense and Sensibility. Elinor is the boring one, the one who keeps her feelings to herself, who never does anything wrong. Willoughby was the dashing, tall, dark, handsome hero. He was the one who understood poetry. Edward Ferrars in some ways feels like a pale imitation of a romance hero. He would never lie like Mr. Rochester, or do anything or stop anyone in order to get the woman he loves. He's a civilized man and he falls in love with a civilized woman. The happy ending between Edward and Elinor seems tacked on, a deus ex machina. Marianne, on the other hand, seems like she gets set down for all her pretensions to marry the ideal man, and ends up with the older gentleman, Colonel Brandon. The movies make us like Brandon far more than the book.

But as a teenager, I identified far more with Elinor than with Marianne, in part because my family was ruthlessly unemotional. I couldn't remember my parents hugging me from the time I turned five or six until the time I was in my twenties, when one of my sisters insisted that they do it again. It was very awkward, trying to put physical affection back into my relationship with them. My mother frequently complained when I was a child that I was too affectionate, but it's something I've tried to put back into my personality as an adult. I'm very affection with my own children.

The scene where Elinor is finally able to tell Marianne the truth, where Marianne chides her for never showing her heart and Elinor bursts into tears—I love that scene, both for the way in which it breaks character for Elinor and which it shows us her deeper character. When I was writing The Rose Throne, I found it easier to write the flashier character of Ailsbet, who was so defiant and unusual. But through every draft of the novel, I found Issa a much more difficult character to bring to life. She is obedient and feminine. She is the foil in some ways for Ailsbet. She is everything that Ailsbet isn't and can't be. She is the “normal” woman, with the woman's magic.

It wasn't until I began to see Issa as a kind of Elinor that I really found her spirit. She isn't without feelings. It's just that she keeps them hidden. She is very controlled, but she has deep feelings. Every scene she is in, I had to work to make sure that the reader senses her hidden feelings and the depth of them. I had to work hidden messages into her language. And then there had to be a great scene in which her feelings finally come out, in a rather over-the-top, loud, and messy moment. I loved writing that moment and I loved Issa after that as a character who could have a moment like that.