THIS BOOK WAS INSPIRED by a volume of court memoirs written in Korea more than two centuries ago. Unlike the heroine of the second half of this volume, I did not read the memoirs of the Crown Princess on an aeroplane at a cruising altitude of 36,000 feet. I read them sitting in the sunshine in a London garden. But, like my fictitious heroine of modern times, I was utterly engrossed by them. I have tried to describe the nature of the impact that they had on me and on Dr Halliwell. It is sheer chance that the Crown Princess came my way at all, but, once I had met her, I could not get her out of my mind. She insisted on my attention. She made me follow her, from text to text, from country to country. She seemed to be making demands on me, but it has not been easy to work out what they might or could be. Several times I have tried to ignore her promptings and to abandon this project, which has been full of difficulties, but she was very persistent. I have turned her story into a novel, of a kind. This is because I am a novelist, and, for better and for worse, writing novels is what I do. I do not know if this is what she would have wanted. She wanted something, but this may not have been it. It may well be that she would have utterly deplored the liberties I have taken with her story. Being dead, she has not had much say in the matter. She has had no control over how her readers interpret or adapt or translate her story. All I can say is that my efforts are a homage to the power of her narration and to the bravery of her long life. They are also, of course, a homage to the most recent and most scholarly translator of the memoirs, Professor JaHyun Kim Haboush, who has rendered the original into a vivid English, and whose pioneering studies of this period of Korean history are an invaluable resource. She has devoted many years of her life to this subject, and has succeeded in giving the Lady Hyegyong a new voice in our time. She too, I think, has been somewhat haunted by the Lady Hyegyong. I feel some anxiety about the way in which I have appropriated this strange material. But appropriation is what novelists do. Whatever we write is, knowingly or unknowingly, a borrowing. Nothing comes from nowhere.