Nicola Cornick is a bestselling novelist and historian. In her latest novel House of Shadows she explores three romances from across the decades: the untold story of Elizabeth Stuart, the Winter Queen; a notorious Regency courtesan and a modern young woman living in Oxfordshire. All these women have fiery passionate relationships and their love affairs raise the question of whether we have one perfect person for each of us. Here Nicola Cornick discusses the pros and cons of soul mates.
House of Shadows
Do we have soul mates? Yes, I believe absolutely that we do. Finding our soul mates, though; that's the difficult part, and once they are found, a happy ending is not guaranteed. There are plenty of pitfalls along the way and soul mates can be difficult to live with. Such an intense connection isn't always comfortable.
I was five years old when my parents divorced, and as I was growing up I formed very firm ideas about relationships, mainly that they weren't reliable and they never lasted. The only person you could depend upon was yourself. So it was a big shock when I first met my soul mate. I was only nineteen and for five years I refused to acknowledge the connection we had because it was so close it scared me. I wasn't sure I actually wanted to share so much with any one person. It took me a long time to trust them.
The idea of soul mates fascinates me, though, and this is the kind of love I wanted to portray in House of Shadows. It's an all-consuming love, a twin souls sort of love that is strong enough to transcend the boundaries of time. There's an instant attraction but often one of the duo is more aware of what is happening than the other. There's a kind of dance between Elizabeth and William in House of Shadows where they draw close but then pull away from each other until they come to a crossroads, a point when they realise they can't live without the other.
So often, though, fate has a different idea. It's more difficult for soul mates to deal with conflict in their relationship because they feel so close that they expect everything to run smoothly between them and life simply isn't like that. There are always barriers and these can tear them apart.
I'll give the final word to Plato, who also believed in the idea of twin souls: "and when one of them meets the other half… the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy and one will not be out of the other's sight, as I may say, even for a moment..."
House of Shadows by Nicola Cornick is out on 5th November ( Mira, £7.99)
Link to book on Amazon is here http://www.amazon.co.uk/House-Shadows-Nicola-Cornick/dp/1848454163/ref=sr_1_sc_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445954604&sr=1-1-spell&keywords=house+of+shadows+by+nicola+cornicl