Many of the fictional characters in the book bear the names of historical figures:

Antonia     Antonia Rollette (or Rossette), Louise's cousin, appears in court documents.
Clémence     Louise dedicated her Oeuvres to Clémence de Bourges, a Lyon noblewoman.
Clément     Clément Marot introduced the sonnet to French literature in the mid 1530s.
Ennemond     Ennemond Perrin, a ropemaker, married Louise in 1542.
François     François Labé was Louise's brother.
Henry     Henry II of France who made his official entry into Lyon in 1548.
Joachim     Joachim du Bellay published Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse in 1549.
Louise     Louise Labé published Oeuvres in Lyon in 1555.
Maurice     Maurice Scève published Délie in 1544.
Pernette     Pernette du Guillet published Les rymes in Lyon in 1545.
Pierre     Pierre Charley, known as Pierre Labé, was Louise's father.
Pontus     Pontus de Tyard published Erreurs amoreuses in 1549.
Thomas     Thomas Fortini witnessed Louise's will.
Yvard     Jean Varoz (or Yvard) sought to seperate from his wife, Antonia, in Geneva in 1552.

Lie's novel is a historiographic study of women. She looks at the way the whole person of Louise Labé has been preserved in texts and introduces a Norwegian audience to more of Labé's texts by including Norwegian translations of some of the sonnets and elegies. Labé's sonnets were particularly noteworthy because the sonnet tradition had excluded women, centering instead on the suffering male lover and the absent female object of his desire. Labé shocked audiences by reversing gender roles, creating female subjects that voiced their sexuality openly. Lie takes up these issues, creating a dialogue between past and present, between Renaissance and contemporary texts, expanding the conversation to a metafictive level to question ontological issues in female erotic desire and corporeality, and narrative control.