The next title in the Bridgerton book series will be a graphic novel. It will also be author Julia Quinn’s “last love letter” to her sister, comic strip artist Violet Charles.
The sisters worked together on the project before Charles died in a car accident last July.
“She and my father were killed by a drunk driver,” Quinn, who will be appearing at the ongoing Emirates Airline Festival of Literature on February 12 and 13, tells The National.
“It was very difficult, but I’m finding joy in [the graphic novel] again. It’s kind of my last love letter to her. I really want the world to see how talented she was. It says it was written by me and illustrated by her, but honestly, she wrote a lot of it.”
Titled Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron, the graphic novel is less a continuation of the Bridgerton saga than it is an elaboration of a literary work that appears as a running gag within the book series.
A gothic novel, it first appears in the seventh Bridgerton book, It’s In His Kiss, as Hyacinth, the eighth and youngest of the Bridgerton siblings, reads it to Lady Danbury during her weekly visits.
“It is this totally over-the-top gothic novel,” Quinn says. “It’s so much fun to write bad writing. It’s the kind where the heroine dies in almost every chapter. I had so much fun with it. Several books later, I had two more characters reading it. Then I did it again, I wrote a book where the hero was the secret author of the novel. So this book keeps popping up as this ongoing joke.”
Eventually, Quinn says, readers began to ask her to actually write Miss Butterworth and the Mad Baron, but Quinn was initially reluctant, saying while it was fun writing snippets, it wouldn’t make for a good, complete novel.
“My sister was an illustrator and cartoonist,” Quinn says. “And we realised it would make for a really fun graphic novel. I think kids can actually read this too.” (TheNational)
