A sultry dose of romance — from Harvard

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Lauren Willig’s academic adviser laughed when she told him why she enrolled in Harvard’s graduate history program: to write a historically accurate romance novel.

She wasn’t joking.

Willig, in her second year at Harvard Law School, is finishing her doctoral dissertation on the Royalists during England’s 17th-century civil war. She’s also the author of “The Secret History of the Pink Carnation,” a “bodice-ripper” that’s been climbing Barnes & Noble’s best seller list less than a month after its release.

It seems a natural progression for a woman who got in trouble in the third grade for bringing a trashy romance novel to school. Then, at age 9, she mailed her manuscript to a publisher. Willig traces her infatuation with the romance genre to when she was 6 and her father, also a historian-turned-lawyer, gave her a book about Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine.

“I was utterly hooked,” says the slender blonde, who looks younger than her 27 years. “Every young girl wants to be a princess. Then, when you find a real-life one, it’s very easy to imagine yourself in that role.”

Willig has been juggling ideas for a romance novel since childhood, but she didn’t start writing “Pink Carnation” until the summer after her second year of graduate school. It was a reward to herself for passing her exams. The work carried over to the following summer. She had a job in the history department’s library, where she spent time writing dialogue for her book.

Hopping centuries
She mined her academic research for her novel’s plot. Her heroine, Eloise Kelly, a brainy Harvard graduate student, travels to London to finish her dissertation on “Aristocratic Espionage During the Wars With France: 1789-1815” — and to escape a cheating boyfriend. There, she finds manuscripts detailing the (fictional) exploits of French Revolutionary-era English spies such as the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian and the Pink Carnation, “the most elusive spy of all time, who saved England itself from Napoleon’s invasion.”

The book bounces back and forth between 19th-century and present-day England, allowing Willig to mix in aristocratic courtship rituals with modern dating observations.

Eloise, for example, professes to suffer from LIPID (Last Idiot Person I Dated) syndrome, “a largely undiagnosed but pervasive disease that afflicts single women.”

“As everyone knows, lipids are fats, and fats are bad for you, and therefore ex-boyfriends must be avoided at all costs,” Willig writes.

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