This is the story behind the novel.

In 2001, I took my children, then 6 and 8, to the Open Air Theatre in London’s Regents’ Park, see the first Shakespeare play I had ever seen myself – A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For me, as for millions of others, this has always seemed the most captivating of Shakespeare’s plays, with its mixture of riotous comedy with potential tragedy, its camp humour, its exquisite poetry and above all, of course, its magic. Having recently finished In a Dark Wood, I was particularly receptive to the idea of woods symbolising places where people could, after much confusion, find the freedom to work out who they really were. I also wanted to write a comedy – to go on holiday myself, as it were – because the writing of In A Dark Wood had been so painful.

What astonished me at the theatre (which is the most idyllic of all possible place in which to see the play) was how instantly my children identified with the fairies as agents of mischief and wildness. A novelist friend, Kate Saunders had always called my son and daughter “Puck and Titania”, and another friend had recently described to me a hellish holiday she had taken with some former friends. The idea of conflating the two into a novel about a house-party in which the children act pretty much as the fairies do in A Midsummer Night’s Dream arrived in a flash. I knew at once it would be a joy to write, and so, despite the onset of agonising RSI (carpal tunnel syndrome) in my hands, it proved to be. The title, of course, could only be Love in Idleness after Oberon’s speech about the “little western flow’r” that produces instantaneous feelings of love when applied to a mortal’s eyelids. In my novel, too, there is a love potion, but whether it is real or whether the adults who drink it sort out their own problems on one magical summer’s night is for the reader to decide.

Lovers of Shakespeare may be outraged that I have taken his plot, and put it into the two penultimate chapters of my novel. In effect, what I have written is the back-story to the play, modernised and skewed round so that there are a number of unexpected outcomes to a well-known story. I hope this will be taken as homage, particularly since the Bard himself frequently used other people’s plots. I don’t believe genius, however serious, needs treating with solemnity. Nor (I wish I did not have to make this explicit, but I know it will be said, probably by the same male critics who accuse me in A Vicious Circle of believing myself Dickens, Thackeray and, er, George Eliot) do I believe myself Shakespeare. I just love him; and the better readers know A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the more they may find to enjoy. What I have written is an entertainment for intelligent people, in the tradition of a number of other novelists, from EM Forster to Alison Lurie.

It is the first novel I have written in which all the characters (Betty excepted) are nice people. As said elsewhere, it’s usually the flawed ones I care most about. In Love In Idleness, Ivo Sponge from A Vicious Circle makes his reappearance as a somewhat reformed character. I always felt that I was never entirely fair to him, and after many readers begged to have him back thought it right he should be shown in a kinder light, and succeed in getting the wish of his heart.
Hemani’s identity as an eye-surgeon came, of course, from the play’s many references to eyes, but her Asian background evolved more slowly after my UK editor at Little,Brown, Richard Beswick, complained that all the characters in my outline of the plot were too privileged. Originally, she began life as a teacher in a comprehensive. Then I began to think about the “little Indian boy” whom Oberon and Titania quarrel over. I was only going to have two children, Tania and Robbie (Puck), but when a friend at Miramax films read the outline she urged me to put more in about children. Why not make him Indian – or at least, half-Indian? So Bron came into being, and my cast was nearly complete.

I should only add that my Bottom is not, of course, Alan Titchmarsh, Monty Don or any of the other celebrity gardeners who have graced out screens in recent years, for reasons that will become obvious.

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