Giveaway Time

 

Happy August, everyone!!!  Since it's Jane Austen's 250th birthday year (and because I found some cool stuff) we are having a giveaway.  Enter to win a tin of P&P tea, a Regency coloring book, a bar of Jane Austen soap, and one of my own signed Regencies by singing up for my newsletter here  (if you're already signed up, you're already entered!)

Happy Regency days!

Behind the Book Peeks

 I'm so excited that the "book of my heart" Secretary to the Socialite is finally out in the world!!!  Here's a little peek behind the story...

I’ve had so many questions from early readers about “who is real” in my story, so I thought I’d make a quick post (and use some of my notebooks full of research!). This was such a fun story for me to write, because Taos has been a special place in my own life. When I was very young, about 4, my parents decided to spend part of the summers in Taos, and so that was my vacation spot every year. One year, we visited a beautiful museum in an old house just outside of town, the Millicent Rogers Museum, and on the gift shop wall was a Vogue photo of a gorgeous blonde woman in a Charles James blouse and piles of turquoise and silver bracelets. I had to know more about her!

The Museum was started by one of Millicent’s three sons, Paul Peralta Ramos, in 1956 to showcase his mother’s collection of nearly 2000 pieces of local art—jewelry, pottery, weavings, carvings, and her own work as well, as she was a jewelry designer. It’s now grown to over 7000 pieces, and moved to its current location in 1968, where it’s continued to grow and expand.

Violet Redfield is fictional, but Millicent Rogers was very real! In her short life (1902-1953) she was a socialite and heiress (her grandfather was a co-founder of Standard Oil), fashion icon, art collector, and later an activist for Native American rights. She contracted rheumatic fever at age 10, which shortened her life and plagued her will illness, but she managed to marry three times, fall in love with men like Clark Gable, Roald Dahl, and Ian Fleming, and live in New York, Virginia, Jamaica, and Austria before making her final home in Taos in 1948. She was buried in her new hometown at the Sierra Vista cemetery on January 1, 1953.

Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962) was, like Millicent, a socialite, daughter of a wealthy Buffalo, New York family, who married several times (four!) and was a patron of the arts. She lived in Florence, at a famous Medici villa, and ran a counterculture salon in New York before landing in Taos in 1917 to establish her own arts colony, attracting people such as DH Lawrence, Georgia O’Keefe, and Ansel Adams. She married Tony Luhan from the Taos Pueblo in 1923, and is buried in the Kit Carson Cemetery in Taos. Her house is now a National Historic Landmark and run as a conference center.

One of the great Taos characters is Dorothy Brett (The Hononorable! 1883-1977). Daughter of a viscount, she was raised amid Queen Victoria’s court, but became an artistic bohemian who attended the Slade School and became friends with the Bloomsbury Circle before befriending DH Lawrence and moving with him to Taos in 1924. She stayed there for the rest of her long life, creating her own unique art (some of which can now be seen in the Smithsonian, as well as the Millicent Rogers Museum and Harwood Museum).

Martha Reed (1922-2010) actually opened her famous shop in 1953, so I fudged it a bit for my story! Daughter of artist Doel Reed, she got her own Arts degree in 1944 and worked at the Philbrook Museum and Dallas Museum of Art before moving to Taos. She first worked at the Pink Horse Shop on the Plaza, where she became well-known for designing her “broomstick” skirts and blouses in calico and velvet, before opening her own shop. She was a very sociable person, famous for her “soirees with hooch” all over town. I am lucky enough to own a painting by her, as well as Martha of Taos original bought by my aunt in the 1960s!

Lorenzo is fictional, but his cousin Benito was real, a man who (like so many others) was tormented by what he had seen in World War II and was helped by Millicent. The Karavas brothers first bought La Fonda in the 1920s, and it came to be run by one of their sons, Saki, until his death in 1996. He was an art collector and (as his tombstone says) “a great Taos character.” Tom McCarthy is also real, and if you visit Taos you can stay at his family’s beautiful B&B, Casa Benavides! They have the best breakfasts, and he is full of stories of his long life in Taos.

These are just a few of the sources I used! I have to thank the Historic Santa Fe Archives for all their help, too.

The Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers Collection at the Beinecke Library of Yale (much of which is online)

Mabel Dodge Luhan, Winter in Taos (1935) and Edge of Taos Desert (1937)

Lois Palken Rudnick, Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture (1996)

Cherie Burns, Searching for Beauty: The Life of Millicent Rogers, the American Heiress Who Taught the World About Style (2011) and Diving for Starfish: The Jeweler, the Actress, the Heiress, and One of the World’s Most Alluring Pieces of Jewelry (2018)

Judith Nasse, A Life in Full (2022)

Annette Tapert and Dana Edkins, The Power of Style (1994)

Sam Hignett, Brett: From Bloomsbury to New Mexico (1985)

Lois P. Rudnick, ed. Mabel Dodge Luhan and Company: American Moderns and the West (2016)

Weekend Links (and a review link!)

 

Happy (almost Bastille Day) everyone!  I hope you're having a great summer.  My tomatoes are looking amazing in the garden, I've been to the opera twice (La Boheme was lovely!), and I've perfected a lemony-gin cocktail that is perfect for warm evenings on the patio.  (Recipe at end)

In the meantime, here are a few fun things to read, and if you'd like a review copy of Secretary to the Socialite, send me an email and I will get you the link!  amccabe7551 AT yahoo.com

A Downton Abbey costume auction!!  (I wish I could buy that Lady Mary wedding dress, I could use it for walking the dogs and going to Trader Joe's...)

Santa Fe is the #1 travel destination!

An article about "Enchanted April" (one of my favorite books and movies)

The Bayeux Tapestry returns to Britain

11 books to read for your summertime sadness

Why the "messy girl" asethetic is taking over decorating (I am right in style)

Lemon Lavender Gin Cocktail

Ingredients

• 2 oz gin
• 1 oz lavender simple syrup
• 1 oz fresh lemon juice
• Club soda or tonic water (to top, optional)
• Ice
• Lemon slices and/or lavender sprigs for garnish (optional) 

Instructions

1. Fill a glass with ice.
2. Combine gin, lavender simple syrup, and lemon juice in a cocktail shaker.
3. Shake well until thoroughly chilled.
4. Strain the mixture over the ice in your glass.
5. Top with club soda or tonic water if desired.
6. Garnish with lemon slices and/or lavender sprigs

Heroine of the Weekend

 

It's been quite a while since we had a Heroine of the Weekend post here!  I love it, since I can take a deeper look at historical women I admire, and I can't believe we haven't featured Aphra Behn before.  Her birthday was July 10, 1640, in Canterbury, and she was s fascinating (if somewhat enigmatic character!), a playwright, poet, translator, spy.  She was one the first English women to earn her living with her writing, and was one of the most popular playwrights of the golden age of Restoration theater.

"All  women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn..."  Virginia Woolf

Behn's early life was quite obscure.  Her father was (maybe) a barber, she was maybe engaged to a man named John Halse in 1657, she maybe traveled to Surinam.  It's clear she was very intelligent, but unclear how she was educated.  She married a man named Johan Behn (possibly Dutch or German) in 1664, but he soon died or they were separated soon after.

She was a staunch supporter of the Stuarts, attached to their court by 1666 (refusing to write a welcome poem to William III after the Glorious Revolution), and was sent as a spy to Antwerp by Charles II  during the Second Anglo-Dutch War. Her code name was Astrea It was not financially rewarding, though, and she may have been sent to debtors' prison after her return (a warrant was issued for her arrest, but it's unclear if it was served).  She started writing plays, hoping to capitalize on the craze for newly reopened theaters.

Her first play, a tragi-romance called The Forc'd Marriage, was performed by the Duke's Men in September 1670, and was a moderate success, but after her third play failed she falls off the record for a few years before returning to write comedies and poetry, as well as translating.  Her most popular play, The Rover (still her most performed work today) debuted in 1676-77, and thereafter she became one of the best-known playwrights in England until her death in 1689.  Her success led to frequent attacks. She was attacked for her private life (she had a long liaison with John Hoyle, a bisexual lawyer) and the morality of her plays, and she was accused of plagiarising The Rover. In the preface to Sir Patient Fancy she argued that she was being singled out because she was a woman, while male playwrights were free to live the most scandalous lives and write whatever plays they wanted.

(You can visit her tomb in Westminster Abbey, as I once did!)

Some good sources on her life:

Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (1997)

Vita Sackville-West, Aphra Behn: The Incomparable Astrea (1927)

Germaine Greer, Slip-Shod Sibyls (1995)

Weekend Book Links

 I hope you've had a good long weekend!!!!  I've been finishing my WIP that will nor end (a Gilded Age romance) and getting set for the release of my next book....

In the meantime, here's a little reading:

The Worth exhibit at the Petite Palais

Alice in Wonderland Day

The oldest document at the UK National Archives

Jane Austen's Least Understood Novel

Jane Austen's True Thoughts on Bath

New adaptation on Sense and Sensibility

How the Millicent Rogers  Museum is Preserving Southwestern Jewelry

Surprise book sale!

 I found out today that The Queen's Christmas Summons is .50 for a short time!  Yep, you heard me, FIFTY CENTS.  I'm not sure how long it will last, so if you feel like Christmas in July grab it now...

"Royal courts are glittering places. But there can be many dangers there." 

The words of Juan, the shipwrecked Spanish sailor Lady Alys Drury nursed back to health, echo in her mind as she puts on another courtly smile. 

Then Alys locks eyes with a handsome man amid the splendor of Queen Elizabeth's Christmas court—Juan is posing as courtier John Huntley! Alys is hurt at Juan's deception until she learns he's an undercover spy for the crown… Amid the murky machinations of the court, can true love still conquer all?

Weekend Links and a Book On Sale

 

Happy last weekend of June, everyone!  I'm not sure how we're here already, it feels like summer just started.  But since I went to opening night at the Santa Fe Opera last night (La Boheme, a favorite!) and festival season is in full swing here, it must be.  (It's also deadline time, eek!  The new wip, a Gilded Age New York romance, is due in 2 weeks).  In the meantime, an older title of mine, Taming of the Rogue, is .99 for a very short time.  (If you love Shakespeare and 16th century theater like I do, I hope you'll enjoy it)

In the meantime, here's a few distractions:

England's first romance-only bookstore

Some real-life inspiration behind the portraits of the "The Gilded Age"

Pompeii's 2000 year old perfume garden

Roses under $20 for your summer wine needs

The history of the Santa Fe Opera