“If I stay in academia, I might end up going someplace random,” she explains with the impeccable logic of a native Manhattanite.

Besides, Willig says, history is “so much more fun as a hobby.…Compared to reading case law, the dissertation becomes so interesting again!”

Before she knew it, Willig had found a literary agent through a friend, and inked a book deal with Dutton. Now, hard at work on The Masque of the Black Tulip—in which two supporting characters from Carnation engage in a little romantic derring-do of their own—her mind is on the future.

CASTING ‘CARNATION’

Willig daydreams about her ideal cast for a film Carnation, should one ever come around.

“This wonderful marketing person [at Dutton] came up to me and said, ‘So, for Richard, Orlando Bloom?’” Willig remembers. “We toyed with the idea of Anne Hathaway for Amy….We couldn’t find a role for Colin Firth, which was distressing.”

But one thing Willig knows she won’t be doing: setting a novel in the historical period that she actually studies, a century and a half before Carnation takes place.

“I’m too close to it,” she says. “I would be so hyper-aware of historical inaccuracies that I would go mad…[In Carnation] my academic antennae aren’t working quite so hard.”

Willig learned this lesson the hard way, at a 1998 screening of Elizabeth—in which Cate Blanchett’s turn as the titular queen was briefly supplemented by a cameo appearance by Marie De Guise, the sixteenth-century Scottish monarch who happened to be the subject of her senior thesis.

“I had to leave in the middle,” Willig recalls. “It was just so historically inaccurate.”

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.