It feels like I've been working toward a girl gang my whole career and here we are. The Belles are the next logical leap for me as a creator. And the center of the story are these women who are true badasses who are able to fight for what they believe in and who are able to find colleagues and a support network that will support them as they do that important fighting. And how the world threatens those spaces and threatens them in those spaces. And I'm talking about all women - cis women and het women and queer women and trans women. What the first book does explore is spaces that are for women. Hell's Belles is very much about the power that women have to move the needle and to change the world and to impact the world from their own spaces. Because historical romance isn't the story of, in my case, the 1840s, it's the story of 2021 and how women are in the world now and how using history as a backdrop can reflect their relevance and their importance and their power in the world. I'm really interested in how women are portrayed historically in all of these spaces. As people whose anger and frustration can really move a needle. The series idea was conceived during a time when I was thinking a lot about the power that women have - in politics and in the domestic arena and in the world at large, as voices and as bodies and as active members of a society. I had to field a lot of angry emails from readers for a few years, but I think people are going to be happy in the long run. So the novella got put away as a concept. It seemed logical pretty quickly that Sesily would be a Belle. I knew I wanted to write a girl-gang series, where it was women who took no prisoners and lived out loud and fought for what they believed in and fell in love with excitement and power and passion and all the things that love should have in it. That's when I started to noodle the idea of Hell's Belles. Sesily and Caleb were in Wicked and the Wallflower, which was the first book in Bareknuckle Bastards. These are these characters are still all here. The tavern from Day of the Duchess is in Covent Garden. Bareknuckle Bastards is set in Covent Garden. When I have some extra time, I'll work on it and then we'll put it out.' I had gone immediately from Day of the Duchess, which was the last book in that series into a new series, The Bareknuckle Bastards.

I knew Sesily and Caleb had more to their love story, and I was like, 'Oh, I'm going to just button them all up with a with a fun little romance, like a Christmas novella, and it'll be a treat for readers.

SARAH MACLEAN: I had an idea for Hell's Belles.

Bombshell maclean