Ron Drummond brought the composer Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre to my attention. In an early draft of the story, I made the inexcusable error of assuming--just because no women composers were mentioned in scores of reference works--that no women composers existed at the court of the Sun King. In fact, Versailles was practically crawling with them. But even Jacquet de la Guerre, who was among the foremost composers of her time, who was a great influence on baroque music, and who was permitted to dedicate her work to Louis XIV (a rare honor for anyone), rates only half a line in an entire modern reference work about music in Louis' court. I am only surprised that I was surprised by this.
Vonda McIntyre, afterword to The Moon and the Sun, p.419
