As an avid reader tucked away on an island state of Australia, I was entranced by all things British. Discovering writers like Austen and Heyer had me hooked on the extended Regency period. Here was real history in a time of wars and social change, mixed with witty fiction stuffed with joyous vocabulary. I’ve travelled the world and still feel the same. The five Bennet sisters from Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice are famous in literature. Only three marry. I began to wonder what happened to the remaining two, which became my novel.
Mary and Kitty Bennet are as unalike as two sisters may be. They are only close in age and a lack of prospects. When wealthy Sebastian Montagu returns to Meryton, Mrs. Bennet loses no time plotting a betrothal, but Kitty has spied another beau and plain Mary has no dreams of marriage. Sebastian’s mother has far higher marital ambitions for her son.
There is heartache, misunderstanding, and change for all, leavened by the wit of Mr. Bennet and the machinations of his irrepressible spouse.
I chose the author’s last complete novel, posthumously published, instead of the more famous Pride & Prejudice, though I allow myself to re-read both once a decade. There’s a poignancy from an author who understands the consequences of missed opportunity. Anne Elliot was unwisely persuaded to reject the man she loved. Several years later she is effectively an old maid, while his fortunes have risen and make him a fine catch. Fate throws them together but old wounds run deep, creating suffering on both sides.
'In Persuasion, Jane Austen is beginning to discover that the world is larger, more mysterious, and more romantic than she had supposed' Virginia Woolf
Jane Austen's moving late novel of missed opportunities and second chances centres on Anne Elliot, no longer young and with few romantic prospects. Eight years earlier, she was persuaded by others to break off her engagement to poor, handsome naval captain Frederick Wentworth. What happens when they meet again is movingly told in Austen's last completed novel. Set in the fashionable societies of Lyme Regis and Bath, Persuasion is a brilliant satire of vanity and pretension,…
The extended period of the Regency takes us from 1789 to 1830. It’s a period of repeated war with Napoleon Bonaparte, the opening up of travel and great social and political change. Do you want to know what to wear to a ball at the Prince Regent’s Brighton Pavilion or how you might journey from London to Bath? Dr. Mortimer takes you there with a broad brush and a light touch.
'Excellent... Mortimer's erudition is formidable' The Times
A time of exuberance, thrills, frills and unchecked bad behaviour...Ian Mortimer turns to what is arguably the most-loved period in British history - the Regency, or Georgian England.
This is the age of Jane Austen and the Romantic poets; the paintings of John Constable and the gardens of Humphry Repton; Britain's military triumphs at Trafalgar and Waterloo. It was perhaps the last age of true freedom before the arrival of the stifling world of Victorian morality.
And like all periods in history, it was an age of many contradictions - where Beethoven's thundering…
Written more than thirty years after the Napoleonic Wars, Thackeray’s novel says a great deal about Regency morality and behaviour. Anti-heroine Becky Sharp is a penniless young woman on the make who considers morals and fair play to be a luxury. Becky moves with the changing times, aiming to advance and profit from every useful contact – particularly male. In short, she uses people and none more so than her supportive friend Amelia Sedley. As time sweeps on, Becky often goes too far but will she get her comeuppance?
William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair depicts the anarchic anti-heroine Beky Sharpe cutting a swathe through the eligible young men of Europe, set against a lucid backdrop of war and international chaos. This Penguin Classics edition is edited with an introduction and notes by John Carey.
No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia Sedley, however, longs only for the caddish soldier George. As the two heroines make their way through the tawdry glamour…
What to choose from this unique writer, who brought the Regency back into 21st century fashion with her large catalogue of novels? I love them all. They’re uniformly hilarious, adventurous, and full of mind-boggling, funny dialogue. Her detailed research is never more brilliantly revealed than in this novel, which is still highly prized by senior military figures as the greatest account of the Battle of Waterloo. All this, in a novel which succeeds on its own terms as a story. What more could one want?
If you love Bridgerton, you'll love Georgette Heyer!
'The greatest writer who ever lived' ANTONIA FRASER 'My generation's Julia Quinn' ADJOA ANDOH 'One of the wittiest, most insightful and rewarding prose writers imaginable' STEPHEN FRY ___________
1815, and the British and French armies are massing ahead of one of the greatest battles of all time ...
Occupied by the British, Brussels however is en fete.
And Lady Barbara Childe, renowned for being as fashionable as she is beautiful, is at the centre of all that is fashionable and light-hearted.
When she meets Charles Audley, the dashing aide de camp to…
More books have been written about Jane Austen than she wrote herself. Some are scholarly while others clearly seek the titbit which will guarantee sales. Experienced biographer Tomalin walks the sensible path through the great novelist’s life, whose works were attributed only to having been written by a lady. Facts are combined with a well-written and often entertaining narrative. The extensive book is well researched and covers the author’s nearest, dearest as well as the detested.
The novels of Jane Austen depict a world of civility, reassuring stability and continuity, which generations of readers have supposed was the world she herself inhabited. Claire Tomalin's biography paints a surprisingly different picture of the Austen family and their Hampshire neighbours, and of Jane's progress through a difficult childhood, an unhappy love affair, her experiences as a poor relation and her decision to reject a marriage that would solve all her problems - except that of continuing as a writer. Both the woman and the novels are radically reassessed in this biography.
Four years old and homeless, William Walters boarded one of the last American Orphan Trains in 1930 and embarked on an astonishing quest through nine decades of U.S. and world history.
For 75 years, the Orphan Trains had transported 250,000 children from the streets and orphanages of the East Coast into homes in the emerging West, sometimes providing loving new families, other times delivering kids into nightmares. Taken by a cruel New Mexico couple, William faced a terrible trial, but his strength and resilience carried him forward into unforgettable adventures.
Whether escaping his abusers, jumping freights as a preteen during the Great Depression, or infiltrating Japanese-held islands as a teenage Marine during WWII, William’s unique path paralleled the tumult of the twentieth century—and personified the American dream.
WINNER, DA VINCI EYE AWARD FOR COVER DESIGN, ERIC HOFFER BOOK AWARDS
HONORABLE MENTION, ERIC HOFFER BOOK AWARDS, E-BOOK NONFICTION
FINALIST, NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS, E-BOOK NONFICTION
FINALIST, NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARDS, MEMOIRS (Overcoming Adversity)
HONORABLE MENTION, READERS' FAVORITE BOOK AWARDS, GENERAL NONFICTION
From 1854 to the early 1930s, the American Orphan Trains transported 250,000 children from the streets and orphanages of the East Coast into homes in the emerging West. Unfortunately, families waiting for the trains weren’t always dreams come true—many times they were nightmares.
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