Lady in Waiting: A Novel

By Susan Meissner

Description:

Love is a choice you make every day. Content in her comfortable marriage of twenty-two years, Jane Lindsay had never expected to watch her husband,  rad, pack his belongings and walk out the door of their Manhattan home. But when it happens, she feels powerless to stop him and the course of events that follow Brad’s departure.Jane finds an old ring in a box of relics from a British jumble sale and discovers a Latin inscription in the band along with just one recognizable word: Jane. Feeling an instant connection to the mysterious ring bearing her namesake, Jane begins a journey to learn more about the ring—and perhaps about herself.~In the sixteenth-century, Lucy Day becomes the dressmaker to Lady Jane Grey, an innocent young woman whose fate seems to be controlled by a dangerous political and religious climate, one threatening to deny her true love and pursuit of her own interests.As the stories of both Janes dovetail through the journey of one ring, it becomes clear that each woman has far more influence over her life than she once imagined. It all comes down to the choices each makes despite the realities they face.

Book Takeaway:

Love is not a feeling that you must tease into perseverance, nor something - when it seems to disappear -that you idly wait on to see if it will return to you, it’s a deliberate choice you make every day of the relationship. It is something that defines you, not that you define.

Awards:

Why the author wrote this book:

I have long been intrigued by the sad story of Lady Jane Grey and have wanted to write a novel that somehow incorporated her life story as a historical thread. She was an actual British monarch who lived during a time when women of noble birth had no opportunity to make their own choices – about anything. We live in a culture today, especially in the Western world, where women can and do make many choices but sometimes life deals you a hand that seems to leave you in wait mode, unable to choose what will happen next. What do you then? Are you ever truly without choice? I brought in a contemporary fictional woman named Jane Lindsay to consider this question. She is an antiques dealer in Manhattan and one day she finds a very old ring hidden inside the binding of an ancient prayer book. Her name is engraved inside: Jane. But she doesn’t know whose it was or how it ended up hidden inside an old book. The ring then becomes our portal to the pastEveryone who was executed in Salem in 1692 was later exonerated. Hysteria, not reason, ruled the day for those long months when innocent people were accused of horrible acts. It didn’t matter how long or how loud the accused proclaimed their innocence. In Salem, you were whatever the crowd said you were. I could have chosen Dachau as the setting. Or Rwanda. Salem wasn’t the first setting people died because the crowd accused them of deserving death and no one stood up to say, “Now hold on there.”