When we recently heard of the ban of my book by the UP government and watched TV images of a mob burning my effigy, my husband voiced what many people must already have thought: “Why, in heaven’s name,” he asked, “did you choose to write about Rani Lakshmibai?” This from a man who is himself from a proud old UP family and who had taken personal delight in travelling around Jhansi and Bithur on my research trips!

Without wishing to confer the business of creative writing with undeserved mystique, I have never heard a writer explain logically how certain characters and stories appear before them as they work their lonely craft. All I do know with some certainty is that my search for an inspiring female figure from British-Indian history (the essential components I wanted in my planned historical novel), had resulted in a whittled-down list of three by late 2003: Sikandar Begum of Bhopal, Begum Hazrat Mahal of Awadh and Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi. The first was a resourceful and persuasive woman who, though siding with the British in 1857, extricated many subsequent demands, including the return of Delhi's Jama Masjid for worship. The second - oddly dropped from many historiographies of 1857 - was the archetypal rebel who sold her jewellery to raise fortifications and troops to fight the British. But it was the last of these three women whom I would eventually choose as my heroine, living with her uncannily beside me through the years it took to write 'Rani'. By the time the manuscript was submitted to my publishers I had - I may as well admit - fallen foul of that biographers' malaise, growing far more enamoured of my subject than I had ever intended.

For one, Lakshmibai seemed more pacifist than nationalist writers had allowed her to be, a quality that I personally found most endearing as the Iraq war started to unfold on my TV screen. She was also intelligent, industrious, practical, persistent and blessed with a modern sensibility that both Sikandar and Hazratmahal, for all their steely determination, lacked. And, of course, who can fail to be moved by that stirring image of a young woman finally marching out in battle against the mighty British army, showing the kind of courage that most of us can only marvel at.

Apart from Lakshmibai's own strength of character, the layers uncovered in my research on 1857 revealed complexities of plot that is heaven-sent material for a novelist. And that was all I intended to do: novelise Lakshmibai's story to the extent that I could draw readers in who would not normally feel inclined to read history and attempt too, while respecting the constraints of established historical fact, to somehow make my heroine's story a tiny bit less tragic. In order to achieve those two objectives, I used the device of placing an unfulfilled love story at the heart of the book. This runs throughout the narrative and essentially comprises a silent yearning by Jhansi's British political agent for the queen he serves. In real life, Major Ellis risked his career in the East India Company by upholding the Rani's right to rule her state, thereby incurring the wrath of Governor-General Dalhousie who soon sent him away from Jhansi in disgrace. In my book, Ellis's love, both for Jhansi and its queen, acts like a metaphor for Empire, representing the attitude many early British settlers had for India before it passed officially into the Crown.

For all the furious claims made by people who have clearly not read my book, Lakshmibai herself -widowed so tragically at 24 - neither 'loves adultery', nor 'has affairs', not even 'makes love in a library/garden'. I am aware, of course, of fictional and non-fictional western depictions of Lakshmibai, going back to Victorian times, that often describe her as licentious but these I chose to dismiss, mostly because promiscuity was a common charge made of strong female character in those highly moralistic times.

Nevertheless, those who understand historical fiction will accept that it is fair game for authorial imagination to be deployed to fill the gaps left by factual material, thereby deviating from non-fiction history writing that can only conjecture using available primary sources, never taking too subjective a stance. Which was what presented me with a final reason for choosing the genre of fiction to tell Rani Lakshmibai's story: because only that form could give this once luminous character from history the chance to speak directly to readers and come to life in ways recognisable to them.

If, as some in this recent row have held, there is no place in historical fiction for national icons like Rani Lakshmibai, it is readers who are the lesser for it. Imagine the genre shying away from all revered or real life characters: we would not have had Shakespeare's entire body of historical plays, no 'Henry IV', 'Julius Caesar', 'Richard II'. Not films like 'Mughal-e-Azam', 'Gandhi', 'Elizabeth'. Not 'A Tale of Two Cities' nor even 'Freedom at Midnight', the book that brought stories of India's independence to my generation more effectively than a whole host of academic text books could hope to do.

To an unbiased reader who reads the Author's Note and subsequently completes the book, it will be manifestly clear that mine is a sincere effort to understand and humanise a brave and immensely admirable woman. For far too many of us, she would otherwise remain a remote stone figure atop high pedestals in a few town squares.