A Knight in Shining Armor

A Knight in Shining Armor is a romance novel by the American writer Jude Deveraux, published in 1989.

The time travel works in both directions, since Nicholas has been brought forward from his own century to clear his name and Dougless ends up going back to live in his, which is what makes the book a historical romance as well as a contemporary one. Nicholas's problem is political and has a date attached to it, and the novel uses the difference between the two periods to make both heroines and both problems concrete: Dougless has to learn how little authority a woman had in the sixteenth century, and Nicholas has to understand how much the modern world has changed the rules he intends to use. The ending depends on the consequences of altering the past rather than on the romance alone, and Deveraux treats the two centuries as a pair of societies with different rules about who is permitted to speak to whom. She had written a long list of romances by this point, several of them set in the same loose family of characters, and this book is one of the most frequently recommended time-slip romances in the genre and is often named by readers as their introduction to it.