“I had promised myself I would start a novel after I finished my [general exams], as a kind of present to myself,” she says.

The writing process was made easier by the scores of notes Willig had already taken from primary source diaries of the Napoleonic era—not in Widener, but in high school, when she wrote a historical novella on the emperor’s stepdaughter.

“I cheated,” Willig kids. “A lot of research for this novel was actually done years ago.”

Back at Harvard in the fall of 2001, Willig began working as a teaching fellow. Her stints leading sections of History 10a, “Western Societies, Politics, and Cultures,” and Historical Study B-57, “The Second British Empire,” left Willig with a bittersweet taste.

“I’m not sure that teaching a Core course is necessarily the best introduction to teaching,” Willig says. But she acknowledges that “grading student papers actually was very helpful.…It makes you think a great deal about structure.”

Still, Willig’s mind was racing with the more free-wheeling, swashbuckling exploits of the Carnation and the Gentian, and word began to get out.

“Lauren’s friends certainly knew that she was writing a novel, but she didn’t talk about it overmuch,” writes Willig’s friend Elizabeth W. Mellyn in an e-mail. Mellyn, a fifth-year doctoral student in history—who, as it happens, is working on The Relic Thieves, a young-adult novel set in fifteenth-century Italy—knows something about balancing fiction with graduate-level history.

“Honestly, it’s not always a good idea in an academic department to admit to writing a novel,” Mellyn reflects. “While some view it as an endeavor lacking seriousness and rigor others can see it as a waste of time.”

Willig describes her colleagues’ attitude towards her writing in more positive terms.

“People were very patient about canceling coffee or drinks because the characters just had to move another chapter,” she says.

But Willig’s doctoral dissertation was less patient. She continued to write Carnation through the summer of 2002, but in the fall of that year, she headed to London for a year-long academic research jaunt not unlike that of Eloise Kelly in her novel.

“I didn’t find a cache of secret family papers,” she jokes in reference to the discovery Kelly makes on page 9 of Carnation.

Willig’s next mission took her back to the States on a “totally accidental” turn to Harvard Law School.

“Practically everyone in my family has a J.D. and a Ph.D.,” she says. “It’s like ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ but with a degree not a curse.”

The move had its practical reasons, too: Willig was convinced that a legal degree would bring her back to her beloved hometown.