As a famous songwriter once said, “What a long, strange trip it’s been,” to The Stolen Girl. I first read Aimée’s story in an obscure out-of-print book from the UK in 1971. The book gave a brief accounting of four European women who lived extremely unusual lives in the Middle East during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Actually, for any European woman to even be present in the Middle East in those days was highly unusual. Most females would only be in that situation on the arm of a husband who had either business or political reasons for making the trip. The four women in the book were there alone…two by choice and two by circumstances beyond their control.

To make it even more interesting, Aimée’s story had an unusual effect on me. As I read it, I saw it, as if remembering rather than reading it for the first time. It was very odd that her life felt like my memory. Remember, this was 1971 and women were just beginning to come into their own in this country so, it made me wonder what her life behind the heavily-guarded walls of the harem might really have been like two hundred years earlier.The more I discovered about the Ottomans, the more I wondered how she had survived and, more miraculously, how she had succeeded on such a grand scale.

I began doing lots of research and investigation, reading every book on the Ottoman Empire I could find. The stories of the Sultans were so fantastic and unlike anything I’d ever known or imagined. They were the stuff that dreams and nightmares are made of. I kept thinking what a fabulous film the story would make. It had everything I loved, sex, opulence, exotic music and clothes, interesting locales like Paris, Martinique and the Sultan’s harem in Istanbul, sea voyages on sailing ships, pirates, intrigue, murder and love! I always thought someone in Hollywood would turn it into a spectacular movie like Gone With the Wind or Cleopatra.

Throughout the next thirty years, it hovered in the back of my mind like a dream so real I never forget it. When I’d finished with careers, businesses, and marriages, I realized that writing the story was exactly what I wanted to do. My first task was learning how to write a novel. You’ll have to let me know if I succeeded. As I said earlier, it’s been quite a ride!