Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

Title:  QUEEN BY RIGHT Author:  Anne Easter Smith Paperback: 528 pages Publisher: Touchstone; Original edition (May 10, 2011) Language: English Received copy from Publisher From the back cover: From the award-winning author of A Rose for the Crown, Daughter of York, and The King’s Grace comes another masterful historical novel—the story of Cecily of York, mother of two kings and the heroine of one of history’s greatest love stories.  In Cecily Neville, duchess of York and ancestor of every English monarch to the present day, Anne Easter Smith has found her most engrossing character yet. History remembers Cecily of York standing on the steps of the Market Cross at Ludlow, facing an attacking army while holding the hands of her two young sons. Queen by Right reveals how she came to step into her destiny, beginning with her marriage to Richard, duke of York, whom she meets when she is nine and he is thirteen. Raised together in her father’s household, they bec...

“Humanity is divided into Men, Women, and Margaret Fuller,” – Edgar Allan Poe “The greatest woman of ancient or modern times,” – Ralph Waldo Emerson Yesterday was the 201st birthday of Margaret Fuller (1810-1850). If you’ve never heard of Margaret Fuller, you are not alone. Although she hung out with the likes of Bronson Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Fuller seems to have slipped through the cracks compared to 19th century feminists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Victoria Woodhull. Yet in her forty years on the planet, Fuller managed to accomplish a lot. Just take a gander at just a few of her firsts (from the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Site ): • First American to write a book about equality for women, Woman in the 19th century (1845). • First woman foreign correspondent and first woman war correspondent to serve under combat conditions, covering the revolutions of 1849. • First woman journalist for Horace Greeley's New-York Tribu...

Today marks the anniversary of the Execution of Anne Boleyn, a sad day of mourning and loss for those of us who love Anne. It's no secret that Anne Boleyn is my favorite of Henry VIII's wives. I just find her endlessly fascinating and enigmatic.  Last year, I was lucky enough to go on the first ever Anne Boleyn experience, where we stayed at Hever Castle for a week. One of the highlights, out of many, on that journey was the day that we traveled to London on the anniversary to lay flowers in the chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula.  We were lucky enough to actually go up to the altar where Anne and Katherine Howard are allegedly buried as well as down into the crypt where George Boleyn and the others are buried within the walls. It was an eerie and unnerving experience, knowing that we were walking on the ground that Anne trod on her final day on earth. Below are a few links to blogs celebrating Anne Boleyn: The Tudor Tutor: Her Grace Under Pressure The Anne Boleyn File...

While researching the lives of both Jane Digby and Lola Montez for my book SCANDALOUS WOMEN, I discovered that they had two things in common:  they both were both mistresses of Ludwig I of Bavaria and both had their portraits included in his Gallery of Beauties. The Gallery of Beauties is a collection of 36 portraits of some of the most beautiful women from Munich's nobility and middle classes. They were painted between 1827 and 1850, mainly by Joseph Karl Stieler who was appointed the court painter in 1820.  Ludwig gathered the portraits in the south pavilion of the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich.  The gold-and-white room with its stucco-work sopraportas was originally used as a small dining room. It was then redesigned by Andreas Gärtner, father of the architect Friedrich von Gärtner. This is a portrait of Jane Digby, Lady Ellenborough (1807 - 1881) as she was then, painted around 1831.  Jane ended up in Munich after the end of a love affair with t...

Anne Lister (1791-1840) lived a most extraordinary and improbable life. She was a beacon of independence in an era when women were considered to be property. She kept a diary all her life that eventually topped out at 6,600 pages (four million words) which is twice the length of Samuel Pepys diaries. These 23 volumes, which can be found at the Halifax Central Library, are an invaluable record, giving the world a peek into what life was like for women in Northern England. The diaries detail her emotions, her day-to-day activities, her financial situation, local and national news, even a daily weather report and the books she was reading. But parts of the diaries were written in a cryptic code of Greek letters and algebraic symbols that concealed aspects of her life that were considered controversial for over a hundred years. Anne’s life was the antithesis of the delicate and refined heroines found in Jane Austen’s novels. Not only was she a shrewd landowner, pioneering industrialist, i...

Title: THE PARIS WIFE Author: Paula McLain Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub Date: 2/22/2011 Synopsis: Chicago, 1920: Hadley Richardson is a quiet twenty-eight-year old who has all but given up on love and happiness-until she meets Ernest Hemingway and her life changes forever. Following a whirlwind courtship and wedding, the pair set sail for Paris, where they become the golden couple in a lively and volatile group-the fabled “Lost Generation” – that includes Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. Though deeply in love, the Hemingways are ill prepared for the hard-drinking and fast-living life of Jazz Age Paris, which hardly values traditional notions of family and monogamy. Surrounded by beautiful women and competing egos, Ernest struggles to find the voice that will earn him a place in history, pouring all the richness and intensity of his life with Hadley and their circle of friends into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises. Hadley, meanw...

As I watched the royal wedding coverage last week, there were the usual suspects amongst the commentators, Tina Brown (now Editor in Chief of Newsweek ), Ingrid Seward ( MAJESTY Magazine), Robert Jobson and Katie Nicholls ( Daily Mail ). But who else should turn up like the proverbial bad penny? Why, it’s James Hewitt cashing in on the royal wedding by sitting down to have a chat with INSIDE EDITION. Yes, the same man that Princess Diana famously declared in the PANORAMA interview, “I adored him, I loved him but I was very let down.” The ‘comeback cad’ as he’s been dubbed by the tabloid press cheekily gave the royal couple his approval. He also promoted the lavish Royal-themed day complete with a big screen TV showing the ceremony at his bar The Polo House at Marbella, Spain where he’s been living since 2007. “I think it’s great William thought long and hard about the decision. They tend to these things more sensibly these days. I haven’t gotten around to sending them a letter ye...

Title:  WOMEN HEROES OF WORLD WAR II : 26 Stories of Espionage, Sabotage, Resistance and Rescue Author:  Kathryn J. Atwood Publisher:  Chicago Review Press Pub Date:  March 1, 2011 "These stories will restore your faith in the human spirit and encourage us all to remember to do what is right, because it is right. Women Heroes of World War II is a must read for anyone who has ever asked themselves: 'What can I do? Can one person really make a difference?'" —Kenneth Koskodan, author of No Greater Ally; The Untold Story of Poland’s Forces in World War II “Kathryn Atwood offers a new face to World War II heroes to include young women who left traditional feminine roles to carry guns, falsify papers, and shelter the hunted.” —Rabbi Malka Drucker and Gay Block, coauthors of Rescuers: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust “Inspiring accounts of the lives of women--some of them still in their teens--whose courage made a difference in the dark days of World Wa...