- For years I’ve wanted to write a two-book set based on the premise: “Two men say they’re the Duke of Something. One of them must be wrong.” (Two points if you can guess where that line comes from. Or you can just peek at my this interview I gave.)
- The Lost Duke of Wyndham and Mr. Cavendish, I Presume take place concurrently, and their plots are very closely intertwined. When I began to develop these two novels, it became clear that if I didn’t want the plot or characters of one book to be dependent upon the other, I would need to write the two books simultaneously. Many scenes occur in both books, but from different points of view.
- The working title of this book was The Two Dukes of Wyndham. In the end, that became the name of the two-book set.
- The model who portrays Grace on the cover is actually the actress Ewa Da Cruz, who plays Vienna Hyatt on As the World Turns. I’d originally written Grace with brown eyes, but when I saw the cover, I changed them to blue!
- This portrait of Marie-Louise O’Murphy by Francois Boucher is the painting that so captured Grace’s imagination:
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- When I wrote The Lost Duke of Wyndham, I purposefully made no mentions of characters from previous books. After eight Bridgerton books, I think I was eager to create an entirely new fictional world. But then, many years later I realized I had (subconsciously?) sneaked in one reference. The Dowager Duchess’s maiden name is Debenham, and twice in When He Was Wicked, the characters refer to that “awful Debenham side” of Michael’s family. Which fits pretty well with the dowager, don’t you thinnk?
