One of the difficulties in choosing periods in history for stories to occur has to do with the position of foreigners -‘ and Saint-Germain is nothing if not a foreigner -‘ in society, and access to women. One of the things that became apparent was that, generally speaking, the lives of women, from the highest social stratum of society to the lowest had more commonality than did the lives of men, since most of the time women had limited legal rights that often forbade the control of their money and property, restricted educational opportunities, and imposed draconian penalties for any perceived or actual transgressions. The problem is that almost all history is written by men about men women, even when they were allowed to be literate, did not reveal much of how they lived, and researching certain periods in history have proven to be much more difficult in this regard than I had anticipated. When I began work on the Saint-Germain Cycle, almost four decades ago, I had three thematic goals in mind: first, to push the vampire archetype as far to the positive as possible and still retain the characteristics of the archetype second, to give the reader some idea of what it was like to live in the time of the story third, to put emphasis on the lives of women -‘ of all three goals, the third has turned out to be the most difficult. In light of our discussions here at Dear Author about historical accuracy, I thought that this author’s viewpoint was worth publishing. It was a really interesting insight into the time period and the balancing an author must do in order to create vibrant characters that still resonate with the period. She offered this essay about her work and the struggles of including women in her historically accurate paranormal stories. She fully meshed the vampire with romance and accurately detailed historical fiction and filtered it through a feminist perspective that both the giving of sustenance and its taking were of equal erotic potency.” While the Saint-Germain series is technically not a romance (Saint Germain cycles through more than one woman during his immortal life span), the Saint-Germain series was perhaps the first genre fiction that attempted to show vampires in a positive light and to “subvert the standard myth to invent the first vampire who was more honorable, humane, and heroic than most of the humans around him. She began writing the Saint Germain stories four decades ago with the first Saint-Germain book published in 1978. NovemSaint-Germain and the Lives of Women by Chelsea Quinn YarbroĬhelsea Quinn Yarbro is referred to by some as the mother of paranormal romance.
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