Laura Frantz is a two-time Christy Award winner and the ECPA bestselling author of 15 novels, including The Seamstress of Acadie, The Rose and the Thistle, The Frontiersman’s Daughter, Courting Morrow Little, The Lacemaker, and A Heart Adrift. She is the proud mom of an American soldier and a career firefighter. Though she will always call Kentucky home, Laura lives with her husband in Washington State.
In this interview, Laura talks with us regarding her latest book, The Indigo Heiress.
FF: Can you please provide a brief summary of your novel, The Indigo Heiress?
A colonial American indigo heiress meets her nemesis in a Scots merchant who saves her from scandal, only to have her save his very life in turn.
FF: What inspired you to write about the indigo trade and its connection between colonial America and Scotland?
When I visited Glasgow, Scotland, I became aware of the tight tie between wealthy Scots merchants and colonial Americans, particularly Virginians. One of my former novels, Tidewater Bride, dealt with the seventeenth-century tobacco trade, so I thought it might be interesting to fast-forward a century and have the great-great-granddaughters of those characters invest in indigo cultivation instead. Same setting and family, different time period and export.
FF: How did you research the historical aspects of indigo cultivation in Virginia and the merchant trade in Glasgow?
The Scots merchants who made Glasgow an eighteenth-century powerhouse remain controversial, and efforts have been taken to minimize or hide their history, given their links to the slave trade. Because of that, research is a challenge. I relied on out-of-print sources, letters, ledgers, and biographies of people during that particular time period to flesh out this story. For indigo history, I read extensively about Eliza Lucas Pinckney, who was an agricultural and economic powerhouse.
FF: Juliet Catesby is described as an “indigo heiress.” Can you tell us more about the significance of indigo during this period?
Juliet is patterned after Eliza Lucas Pinckney, a truly remarkable South Carolinian, famous for transforming eighteenth-century indigo cultivation and exports. Her state had far more success with indigo than Virginia because of the climate and soil. Indigo was being produced by Virginians, just not as successfully. Indigo blue was the colonial American color, though it was labor-intensive and very difficult to process. Done successfully, it made an extraordinary blue dye.
FF: The Indigo Heiress involves an arranged marriage. What situations in the Catesbys’ family led to this marriage?
A crisis during the eighteenth century kept colonial American plantation owners deeply indebted to Scots merchants, who extended credit to keep their plantations running. Even with so-called successful planters exporting indigo and tobacco, the crippling debt continued. The Catesbys are so overcome with debt that the daughters’ dowries are in question. The logical solution at that time would have been to marry well as a means of alleviating or canceling the debt.
FF: How common were arranged marriages in America and Scotland during this time?
Making an advantageous marriage was always key in colonial American society as well as in the mother country, Britain. Though marrying for love was becoming more common back then, women had few rights and fathers often arranged marriages to their own advantage.
FF: Can you tell us more about the Buchanan clan and their role in the story?
The Buchanans are the essence of the so-called tobacco lords and Glaswegian merchants who ran and ruled Glasgow for more than a century. Many of these men, though merchants, were more wealthy than European aristocrats and titled persons. Their fortunes were immense. They were shrewd businessmen who knew how to leverage colonial and foreign markets to the best advantage, often intermarrying with other merchant families and passing on their firms and fortunes to their heirs.
FF: Your story blends romance, history, and suspense. How do you balance these elements in your writing?
I believe a good novel has all three elements, though my stories are heavier on history and romance than suspense. But the suspense is there and keeps you turning pages. It’s a delicate balance not to let one outweigh another. Personally, I prefer historical novels with a predominant romantic theme, so I write with that in mind.
FF: What message or themes do you hope readers will take away from The Indigo Heiress?
That often our personal choices are entirely wrong for us and will lead us to great heartache. “Follow your heart” is a very dangerous, destructive maxim. Thankfully, even if we do follow our hearts and find ourselves in a mess of our own making, the Lord promises to work all things out for our good. You’ll see this played out in Juliet and Leith’s story.
FF: What are you working on next?
I’m currently on the page in 1777 New York, writing a Revolutionary War novel set to release in 2026 to coincide with the United States’ 250th anniversary of independence. I’m hoping to give readers a look into that very historic time period, which is fascinating on so many levels. Our forefathers and founders made unbelievable sacrifices and achieved staggering success when they made George III the last king of America.
The Indigo Heiress
Laura Frantz
Revell
Genres: Historical Romance
Release Date: January 21, 2025
ISBN-10: 0800740696
ISBN-13: 978-0800740696
Book Summary:
Virigina plantation life is all she has ever known.
But could the life she was meant to live be waiting on a distant shore?
In 1774, Juliet Catesby lives with her father and sister at Royal Vale, the James River plantation founded by her Virginia family over a century before. Indigo cultivation is her foremost concern, though its export tethers her family to the powerful Buchanan clan of Glasgow, Scotland.
When the heir of the Buchanan firm arrives on their shores, Juliet discovers that her father has arranged for one of his daughters to marry the Scot as a means of canceling the family’s crippling debt. Confident it will be her younger, lovelier sister, Juliet is appalled when Leith Buchanan selects her instead.
Despite her initial refusal, Juliet realizes that fleeing Virginia is her only choice after finding herself in the midst of a scandal. The ship just leaving the harbor for Glasgow is her only hope. But she will soon realize that being part of the complex and calculating Buchanan clan is not the sanctuary she imagined—and the man who saved her from ruin is the very one she must now save in return.
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