The winner of an ebook copy of A Promise Of Possibilities by my friend Laurel Hawkes, is…..
Cassandra!!
Which proves you can be last and still be randomly selected.
Cassandra, email me at diane@dianegaston.com and let me know what kind of ebook format you would like. If it is Kindle or Barnes and Noble, it should be easy, but if not, we’ll figure it out!
Thanks to everyone for visiting Risky Regencies!
Diane and the Riskies
I’m recycling a post from a few years ago about Mary Shelley, whose birthday it is today.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on this day in 1797, the daughter of radicals Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Well-educated and not particularly happy at home (there was some friction between Mary and her stepmother Mary Jane Clairmont), it was only natural that when a handsome young poet showed up, she’d fall in love and run off with him. Mary’s step-sister Claire Clairmont, who later had a torrid affair with Byron, accompanied them to Europe.
Shelley already had a wife, Harriet, but these were the heady days of sex, opium, and the sonata form. Godwin, his radical sexual politics put to the test, became estranged from his daughter.
In the summer of 1816, Shelley, Mary, and Byron were in Switzerland and it was there, in response to a challenge to tell the best ghost story, Mary started to write Frankenstein. After Shelley’s death in 1822 she returned to England and supported herself as a writer until her death in 1851, penning short stories, essays, poems, and reviews, and several other novels.
I’m not doing justice at all to Mary’s adventurous, unconventional, and sad life, so I encourage you to read a book that does–Passion by Jude Morgan. It’s about the women who became entangled with Byron, Shelley, and Keats, beautifully written, and with a wonderfully strong sense of time and place. It’s also a very sad book–if you know anything at all about these people, you’ll know everything ended badly, particularly for the women.
Have you read this book or any other book, fictional or biographical, about the Godwins, Mary, Shelley, Byron et al? Do you have any recommendations?
In blatant self promotion, you can enter a contest at Goodreads to win a copy of Hidden Paradise, which recently got this wonderful review at Heroes and Heartbreakers. Go for it.
I suspect that hats were the accessory vice of choice for many Regency ladies. However, many styles of hat that I like on other people don’t look good on me. So I rarely wear hats, but when I do, I have a simple crocheted wool hat for winter and a straw cloche for summer. I wouldn’t be able to pull off any of these elaborate styles from 1811. I’d end up wearing something small and simple. Cute, but one or two would be enough.
During the Regency, I think I would be happy with paste and pinchbeck. Paste was the term for a type of glass that was cut to resemble gemstones. It takes a better eye than mine to distinguish the stones in these earrings from diamonds.
Pinchbeck was an alloy of base metals that looks enough like gold to please me. I’ve long admired this set of earrings from www.georgianjewelry.com, one of my favorite places to window shop for my heroines.Hi, Djenet Mallani here. I’m pleased to announce that my Little Black Dress titles have been published in Russian and I had lots of fun working out which was which–unsuccessfully, as it turns out. You can see all three of them here in their old school glory on amazon.
I can read the cyrillic alphabet but if you can’t, this is called Prekrasnaya vodova. What I can’t do is speak any Russian, other than hello, goodbye, thank you, cup of tea, please. All I need to know in any language, really. This, I believe, since one of the blurbs referred to ledi Elmherst and Nikolasa Kongrivansa has to be A Most Lamentable Comedy. The man and woman are pretty good other than floating in an odd almost heart-shaped bubble, but what is that item behind them? A rolltop desk? A primitive computer? A beehive? You tell me.
So that one was pretty straightforward. Now onto mystery book #1, Schastlivoe nedorazumenie. I believe this is Improper Relations since it has characters called Sharlotta Heiden and vikontom Shadderli. He looks like some sort of eurotrash lounge lizard, she looks like his aunty, and I can’t figure out where they are. They seem to be outside but they’re on the wrong side of what I assume to be a balcony railing. They’re teetering on the outer ledge. Possibly he’s threatening to push her off if she doesn’t tell him where the drugs are.
But it’s this one, Skandalnaia sviaz, which really confuses me. Since it stars the aforementioned Sharlotta Heiden and vikontom Shadderli it seems to be another version of Improper Relations. Why does he have a small woman emerging from his butt?–or is it a disembodied head impaled on the wrought iron thing he’s sitting on? It certainly seems to be floating her boat. Is that a lampshade to the left or are they in the fabled Amber Room of the Catharine Palace near St. Petersburg? Thoughts?
So naturally I did a search on the title and came up with this gem:
Eurovision Song Contest participant from Ukraine admitted to sexual relations with a soloist of the group VIA Gra.
Okay.
Also a link to google books and Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading.
I’m confused. Can anyone out there speak Russian? Help?
And I’m guest blogging at Lady Scribes today, talking about the new Dedication and giving away a free download, so please come on over and chat!