A game of chance with love on the line... London, 1784 Thea Worthington, Duchess of Wynchester divides her time between social engagements and playing her luck against fickle fortune. Yet every gamble is only a bluff-a means to hide from the pain deep within her, and the loss of a babe she never held in her arms. Now Thea's luck is about to run out. Her estranged husband has returned and seeks a reunion... Plagued with guilt over what happened to his wife three years ago, the Duke of Wynchester has kept his distance. The duke is resolved to piece his family back together, especially now that he's discovered his beloved brother-long thought dead-still lives. But Thea's lovely, porcelain facade is on the verge of cracking...spurred on by the duke's brother's secretive, malevolent animosity. With everything riding on her future, Thea plays a daring game of chance for love and her marriage...and this time, the dice are most certainly rigged. Each book in The Furies series is STANDALONE. Series order: Book 1: LADY VICE Book 2: LADY SCANDAL Book 3: DUCHESS DECADENCE
'A scintillating story superbly told... [Ostler] packs every paragraph with eye-opening detail' The Times 'A rollicking read... [Ostler] tells Elizabeth's story with admirable style and gusto' Sunday Times 'Terrifically entertaining: if you liked Bridgerton, you’ll love this...and her research is impeccable' Evening Standard 'Fascinating. Magnificent. Sensitively told' Hallie Rubenhold, author of The Five 'Catherine Ostler’s superb, gripping, decadent biography brings an extraordinary woman and a whole world blazingly to life' Simon Sebag Montefiore When the glamorous Elizabeth Chudleigh, Duchess of Kingston, Countess of Bristol, went on trial at Westminster Hall for bigamy in April 1776, the story drew more attention in society than the American War of Independence. A clandestine, candlelit wedding to the young heir to an earldom, a second marriage to a Duke, a lust for diamonds and an electrifying appearance at a masquerade ball in a diaphanous dress: no wonder the trial was a sensation. However, Elizabeth refused to submit to public humiliation and retire quietly. Rather than backing gracefully out of the limelight, she embarked on a Grand Tour of Europe, being welcomed by the Pope and Catherine the Great among others. As maid of honour to Augusta, Princess of Wales, Elizabeth led her life in the inner circle of the Hanoverian court and her exploits delighted and scandalised the press and the people. She made headlines, and was a constant feature in penny prints and gossip columns. Writers were intrigued by her. Thackeray drew on Elizabeth as inspiration for his calculating, alluring Becky Sharp. But her behaviour, often depicted as attention-seeking and manipulative, hid a more complex tale – that of Elizabeth’s fight to overcome personal tragedy and loss. Now, in this brilliantly told and evocative biography, Catherine Ostler takes a fresh look at Elizabeth’s story and seeks to understand and reappraise a woman who refused to be defined by society’s expectations of her. A woman who was by turns, brave, loving and generous but also reckless, greedy and insecure; a woman totally unwilling to accept the female status of underdog or to hand over all the power, the glory and the adventures of life to men.
A governess and her secret take an invincible duke by storm... The Duke of Hurtheven will stop at nothing to protect those he loves. So, when a mysterious new governess captures his godchild’s affection, he vows to uncover her secrets. Instead, she sets him aflame. Miss Hera Bythesea accepted a governess position to secure the character reference she needs to reclaim her secret child. But she did not count on Hurtheven—curious, relentless, and temptation in human form. In Hera's world, Hurtheven faces a challenge his power and wealth cannot solve. But for the love of unwed mother and child, he’ll undertake any Herculean Labor.
Child of the Great Depression, teenage “Duchess of Palms” beauty queen, wife of an acclaimed novelist and later of a brilliant U.S. congressman, and ultimately a successful single working woman and mother, Nadine Eckhardt has lived a fascinating life. In this unique, funny, and honest memoir, she recounts her journey from being a “fifties girl” who lived through the men in her life to becoming a woman in her own right, working toward her own goals. Eckhardt’s first marriage to writer Billy Lee Brammer gave her entrée to liberal political and literary circles in Austin and Washington, where she and Brammer both worked for Senator Lyndon B. Johnson. She describes the heady excitement of LBJ’s world—a milieu that Brammer vividly captured in his novel The Gay Place. She next recalls her second marriage to Bob Eckhardt, whom she helped get elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as her growing involvement with the counterculture of social protest, sexual revolution, and drug use. Eckhardt honestly recounts how the changing times changed her perception of herself, recalling that “I didn’t know how to achieve for myself, only for others, and I felt ripped off and empty.” This painful realization opened the door to a new life for Eckhardt. Her memoir concludes with a joyful description of her multifaceted later life as a restaurateur, assistant to Molly Ivins, writer, and center of a wide circle of friends.
London, 1814 Lady Jane Langley values logic and reason over passion and emotion. Her intellect has given her value in the eyes of both her father and society. Logic gives way to terrible, icy fear when Jane finds herself in a devastating carriage accident... an accident in which she is helpless to do anything but watch as her aristocratic companion is murdered. But this was no mere accident. This was an assassination. Spy and grandson of Lord Landsdowne, Gerard Badeau is methodic in his dark, shadowy work, knowing that any display of emotion could get him killed. Something about the mysterious woman and her cool blue eyes stays Gerard's lethal hand. Now he has both a witness and a hostage. And if he doesn't kill Lady Jane Langley, he risks a fate that is far, far worse...falling in love with her. Each book in the Group of Eight series is STANDALONE: * Lord of Regrets * Lady of Intrigue
Not every lady plays by the rules... Lady Lavinia Vaile knows what happens to a woman who puts her faith in society. For her, it was a disastrous marriage to a depraved man—one she threatened to shoot when she left him. Now Lavinia lives outside of society's strict conventions, hosting private gambling parties. It's only when her husband is shot dead that Lavinia finds herself in terrible danger... A former judge in India's high court, Maximilian Harrison will do anything he can to help Lavinia. In the darkest of times, he held on to thoughts of her and the love they once shared. Now he risks his own position in society—along with his ambitions—in order to clear her name. Yet as desire reignites between them, Lavinia remains caught up in secrets and shame. Her only salvation is to do the unthinkable...and trust in both Maximilian and love. Each book in The Furies series is STANDALONE. Series order: Book 1: LADY VICE Book 2: LADY SCANDAL Book 3: DUCHESS DECADENCE
Thus wrote William Camden with reference to his projected life of Lord Burghley, which was never written; and the words may be applied not inappropriately to the present book and its writer. Some years ago I passed many laborious months in archives and libraries at home and abroad, searching and transcribing contemporary papers for what I hoped to make a complete history of the long reign of Philip IV., during which the final seal of decline was stamped indelibly upon the proud Spanish empire handed down by the great Charles V. to his descendants. I had dreamed of writing a book which should not only be a social review of the period signalised by the triumph of French over Spanish influence in the civilisation of Europe, but also a political history of the wane and final disappearance of the prodigious national imposture that had enabled Spain, aided by the rivalries between other nations, to dominate the world for a century by moral force unsupported by any proportionate material power. The sources to be studied for such a history were enormous in bulk and widely scattered, and I worked very hard at my self-set task. But at length I, too, began to wax faint-hearted; not, indeed, because my "noble Lord had died"; for no individual lord, noble or ignoble, has ever done, or I suppose ever will do, anything for me or my books; but because I was told by those whose business it is to study his moods, that the only "noble Lord" to whom I look for patronage, namely the sympathetic public in England and the United States that buys and reads my books, had somewhat changed his tastes. He wanted to know and understand, I was told, more about the human beings who personified the events of history, than about the plans of the battles they fought. He wanted to draw aside the impersonal veil which historians had interposed between him and the men and women whose lives made up the world of long ago; to see the great ones in their habits as they lived, to witness their sports, to listen to their words, to read their private letters, and with these advantages to obtain the key to their hearts and to get behind their minds; and so to learn history through the human actors, rather than dimly divine the human actors by means of the events of their times. In fact, he cared no longer, I was told, for the stately three-decker histories which occupied half a lifetime to write, and are now for the most part relegated, in handsome leather bindings, to the least frequented shelves of dusty libraries.
During the final decades of the nineteenth century, a common mind-set emerged among many intellectuals--"la decadence." Many novels and novellas of the period were populated with protagonists who were fragile, refined, self-absorbed, and preoccupied with a trivially exquisite aesthetic. A Baedeker of Decadence presents thirty-two international works of literary decadence written between 1884 and 1927. George C. Schoolfield, a world authority on the decadent novel, offers an entertaining and wide-ranging commentary on this highly significant literary and cultural phenomenon. Schoolfield tracks down the symptoms of decadence in narrative works written in more than a dozen languages, providing synopses and passages in English translation to give a sense of each author's style and tone. Schoolfield throws new light on the close intellectual kinship of authors from August Strindberg to Bram Stoker to Thomas Mann, and on the ingredients, themes, motifs, and preconceptions that characterized decadent literature.
The first holistic reappraisal of the significance of the decadent movement, from the 1900s through the 1930s. Decadence in the Age of Modernism begins where the history of the decadent movement all too often ends: in 1895. It argues that the decadent principles and aesthetics of Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and others continued to exert a compelling legacy on the next generation of writers, from high modernists and late decadents to writers of the Harlem Renaissance. Writers associated with this decadent counterculture were consciously celebrated but more often blushingly denied, even as they exerted a compelling influence on the early twentieth century. Offering a multifaceted critical revision of how modernism evolved out of, and coexisted with, the decadent movement, the essays in this collection reveal how decadent principles infused twentieth-century prose, poetry, drama, and newspapers. In particular, this book demonstrates the potent impact of decadence on the evolution of queer identity and self-fashioning in the early twentieth century. In close readings of an eclectic range of works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence to Ronald Firbank, Bruce Nugent, and Carl Van Vechten, these essays grapple with a range of related issues, including individualism, the end of Empire, the politics of camp, experimentalism, and the critique of modernity. Contributors: Howard J. Booth, Joseph Bristow, Ellen Crowell, Nick Freeman, Ellis Hanson, Kate Hext, Kirsten MacLeod, Kristin Mahoney, Douglas Mao, Michèle Mendelssohn, Alex Murray, Sarah Parker, Vincent Sherry
The Court of Philip IV.: Spain in Decadence is a book by Martin Andrew Sharp Hume. It serves as a biography on Philip IV, who was King of Spain from 1621 to his death in 1665.
