The truthful answer is: we rarely know at first.

Fanny Marling did not arrive in my mind as a fully formed Regency heroine. She appeared quietly, watching the room with an expression that suggested she had already noticed something everyone else had missed.

And she usually had.

Fanny is not a woman who trusts easily. Raised partly in Canton before returning to England, she carries with her a perspective that does not entirely belong to the drawing rooms of London. The rituals of English society—the polite smiles, the careful lies, the rigid expectations—strike her as a performance she has learned to navigate rather than a world she naturally inhabits.

She survives by observing.

By listening.

By asking herself questions no one else thinks to ask.

Who holds the power in this room?
Who is pretending?
What are they hiding?

Her wit is deliberate. Her calm is often strategic. Emotion, for Fanny, is something to be guarded carefully, revealed only when it is safe—or necessary.

Yet beneath that discipline lies something far more vulnerable: a woman who has learned self-reliance because she had no other choice.

Fanny also carries with her a philosophy shaped by Eastern thought—ideas of balance, restraint, and duty. These ideas guide her actions as much as her martial training in Wing Chun. For her, discipline is not only physical. It is emotional.

Stillness can be a weapon.

Silence can be protection.

And sometimes the greatest strength lies in knowing when not to strike.

In Seduced by Intrigue, Fanny must navigate deception, danger, and a society that does not quite know what to make of her. She tests everyone she meets—including Lysander de Vere, who quickly learns that wit may be the only weapon that stands a chance against hers.

I hope readers will enjoy meeting her as much as I enjoyed discovering who she was.

Because once Fanny Marling walks into a story, she has very little interest in leaving it quietly.

— Alice

Subscribe now