Here are 4 books that Alix of Wanthwaite fans have personally recommended once you finish the Alix of Wanthwaite series.
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I’m a writer of traditional Regency romances who would be happy to let everyone fight over Mr. Darcy while I sneak off with Captain Wentworth. If period dramas are dress-up for grown-ups, the best historical fiction is nothing less than a trip in a time machine, no Dramamine required. So if you’ve ever dreamed of being knocked over the head and waking up in a Jane Austen novel, you’re not alone. Come join me in one of my Regencies. I’ll save you a glass of ratafia.
Technically speaking, this isn’t historical fiction because, when Trollope wrote it, it was contemporary(Victorian) fiction. But if you love Austen adaptations or anything set in later periods where people wore fancy, constrictive clothing, this book is for you. Barchester is a cathedral town getting a new bishop, and, oh, man, is everyone in a tizzy. Every cleric is angling for a promotion, simultaneously falling at the feet of the exotic Signora Madeline Vesey Neroni while refusing to bow the knee to the new powers that be. And if you have a soft spot for henpecked husbands, Trollope wrote one for the ages, with wife Mrs. Proudie stealing every scene. For my money, with his keen eye and wicked humor, Trollope is the true heir to Jane Austen.
Anthony Trollope was well aware that the seemingly parochial power struggles that determine the action of Barchester Towers - struggles whose comic possibilities he exploits to hilarious effect - actually went to the heart of mid-Victorian English society, and had, in other times and other guises, led to civil war and constitutional upheaval.
That awareness heightens the comedy and intensifies the drama in this magnificent novel and it transforms the story of a fight for ascendency among the clergy and dependants of a great English cathedral into something fundamental and universal. Barchester Towers is the second of Trollope's six Barchester…
I’m a writer of traditional Regency romances who would be happy to let everyone fight over Mr. Darcy while I sneak off with Captain Wentworth. If period dramas are dress-up for grown-ups, the best historical fiction is nothing less than a trip in a time machine, no Dramamine required. So if you’ve ever dreamed of being knocked over the head and waking up in a Jane Austen novel, you’re not alone. Come join me in one of my Regencies. I’ll save you a glass of ratafia.
As an author of Regency romances, I think of Forester’s Hornblowernovels as the guy-friendly equivalents, and I tried and tried to get my son to read these. Sigh. The series follows a Royal Navy man during the Napoleonic Wars, from his days as a lowly midshipman to his zenith as an admiral, and every last book in the series is so stinking good. Forester writes the most bang-up action scenes and has researched the heck out of everything, without ever bludgeoning you over the head with it. His characters are alive—flawed and fascinating and funny. In short, if this man weren’t dead for the last sixty years, I would marry him.
An important contribution to the economic literature, this book provides a systematic analysis of the problems of economic growth and stability presented by the changing role of energy in modern economics. The result of a massive study by the author of the effects of energy and energy shocks on the world economy, the volume is organized around the theme that energy is an integral feature of the economy and that any interpretation of short-term movements in economic activity is likely to be seriously at fault if it neglects energy supply changes and their repercussions. The author takes both an historical…
I first read and fell in love with Jane Austen's novels at the age of thirteen, and thus began a lifelong enthusiasm for nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century literature. Though I studied English Literature and Art History at university, I embarked on a professional career working in an entirely unrelated field. I never lost my childhood desire to write fiction. Inspiration came, as it will, unexpectedly. I sat down one day in the grand Reading Room of the New York Public Library, pad and pen in hand, and began to write. I happened to be suffering a spell of insomnia at the time, and before I knew it, I had a draft of my first novel.
Is Undine Spragg Edith Wharton’s least admiral protagonist? Perhaps. But as well, she is her most beguiling.
With her modest mid-western roots and her hunger for something more, she personifies the American dream, only she incarnates its less noble form. Cunning and beautiful, she uses her every charm exclusively in service to her ambition.
There is something thoroughly modern about her self-belief, her perpetual reinvention. It’s impossible to look away as she ruthlessly forges her own future, defying expectations and conventions time and again.
They say what goes around comes around; but when it comes to Undine Spragg we are constantly left wondering if the truism can hold.
Edith Wharton’s classic story of one woman’s quest for wealth and status after the turn of the twentieth century
Beautiful, selfish, and driven, Undine Spragg arrives in New York with all of the ambition and naiveté that her midwestern, nouveau riche upbringing afforded her. As cunning as she is lovely, Undine has but one goal in life: to ascend to the upper echelons of high society. And so with a single-minded tenacity, Undine continues to maneuver through life, finding all the while that true satisfaction remains just beyond her grasp.
Hailed by Elizabeth Hardwick as “Edith Wharton’s finest achievement,” The…
My passion for the Middle Ages began with castles. I lived in Germany for a time, where there are a lot of castles, and I got sucked into the whole romantic notion of living a castle life, though I’d probably have been more of a scullery maid than a princess. When I decided to try writing a novel, I figured castles had to be involved somehow. I started doing research on medieval subjects that would make a good book. Unfortunately, the time period I ended up choosing for my novel was the early 8th century—no castles. I spent over twenty years researching and writing my novel, so I hope I learned something.
The prose of this classic novel can be a little sticky to our 21st-century sensibilities, but in all other ways, Scott is a modern writer, addressing the issues of anti-Semitism and the corruption of the Church at a time when those things weren’t cool. Plus, we have another awesome warrior-hero in Sir Wilfred of Ivanhoe and jousting to boot. Who doesn’t love a good tourney? My daughter and I hit the Renaissance Faires every year just to see men pretend to stab each other from horseback with long sticks. The plotting of this book is simply perfection—they just don’t write them like this anymore. It’s a hero’s tale with a big dollop of romance—my favorite.
Ivanhoe is set in England in the 1190s, over a century after the Norman Conquest which saw William the Conqueror seize the English throne. A wealthy nobleman named Cedric, who is intent on restoring a Saxon to the throne, plans to wed Rowena, a beautiful young woman who is his ward, to the Saxon Athelstane of Coningsburgh. There’s just one small problem: Rowena has fallen in love with Cedric’s son, Wilfred of Ivanhoe. To get him out of the way so Rowena will marry Athelstane, Cedric banishes his own son from the kingdom. Ivanhoe (as Wilfred is known, by his…
