Books like Georgiana

I have always been fascinated by secret undercover operations and by the Second World War.

The two are meshed in this autobiography of a young cryptographic genius who was recruited into the SOE to help sort out our coding disasters and improve security for the agents. It is brilliantly funny, savage, and desperately moving.

His poem, "The Life That I Have, Is All That I Have" was written for his fiancée who was killed. He later gave it to Violette Szabo (see Carve Her Name with Pride) to encode her messages undercover in France before her capture and death. He inspired me to write my SOE novels.

Immersed in a boarding school with my parents living on another continent, I searched for comfort and found it in Charlotte Brontë’s novel of a young orphan struggling to make her way in Victorian England.

Although considered by some to be shocking when it was published in 1847, it was a sensation and has never been out of print since. 

"Do you think," she cries to the rich Mr Rochester, the man she loves, "because I am poor, plain and little, that I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong – I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart."

Complete with Gothic frills, brooding landscapes and high drama, leavened with intelligence and psychological acuity, Jane Eyre is a love story which contains one of the great cries for equality in literature.

Who could fail to respond? I certainly did, and I remember it every time… show more.

Who washed the socks and boiled the eggs for the so-called Lake Poets? Or any poet, for that matter? The answer is almost certainly their sisters, wives and daughters. 

This is an account of the gifted, long-suffering, often tormented, coterie of women who laboured in the shadow of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey. Connected by blood as well as marriage, the women were very different, but each was as trapped as the other by their gender.

The emotional fallout resulted in illnesses, neurosis, and deep unhappiness. Like her father, Sara Coleridge was an opium addict. Dorothy Wordsworth was consumed by love for her brother, and Emily Southey was a depressive.

I was very struck by the struggles to gain expression and to be treated as intellectual equals. Their stories made me determined never to be hampered from writing my own. I thought of those women as I wrote one of my… show more.

It is all the fault of the corridor… I’ve always been fascinated by the family – what is a family, how does it function?

But where did we get the idea that it should be a tight nuclear unit? In medieval times, family encompassed a swathe of relations and hangers-on who lived together in large unprivate households.

When I stumbled across Lawrence Stone’s controversial, but utterly compelling, analysis of the changes that resulted in the modern nuclear family, I was hooked. Once corridors, which allowed rooms with doors to open off them, were put into buildings, privacy became the norm, and the smaller family began to take shape.  

I have always been interested in the Jack the Ripper lore. If you feel the same, Stalking Jack the Ripper does not disappoint. The book follows Audrey Rose Wadsworth in Victorian-era England as she hunts Jack the Ripper. Audrey is not the typical Victorian lady. She has a passion for forensic medicine and doesn’t mind the sight of corpses. Maniscalco does a fantastic job of presenting the widely known case details while putting her own spin on it and even adding a few details.

Because everyone loves a good rebel. Eleanor de Montfort was little known before Wilkinson’s fine book. She was the daughter of King John, the sister of King Henry III, and the aunt of King Edward I. She was also the wife of one of England’s most notorious rebels, Simon de Montfort, whose leadership during the period of baronial reform and rebellion (1258-67) saw him rise to become the de facto ruler of England and host of the first representative parliament. Eleanor was no shrinking violet in all of this; she actively supported her husband’s cause through recruitment of allies, strategic hospitality, caring for royal prisoners, and suing for the properties and rights of her sons and husband, even after her husband’s gruesome death and desecration at the Battle of Evesham turned her into an outlaw on the run from English authorities.

Wilkinson’s book is a pleasure to read, as she… show more.

While Below Stairs might be tinged with drama, Rose shows readers the loyal, dutiful side of a lady's maid to the incredibly influential Nancy Astor.

Rose details the tumultuous yet rewarding relationship she built with Lady Astor that lasted until the day of her death in this touching story. A fun fact loosely touched on in the memoir, without specifically naming the Roosevelts, was that the Astors visited and stayed at Springwood with FDR, including the memoirist, Rose!

My focus often wanes when I am reading a lot of historic facts, but this biography of the British titled Mountbatten couple is a riveting read. Whilst their public lives and public duties brought them accolades and respect, their private lives were totally outrageous, given the time and their close connections to the Queen of England. The book offers a wonderful descriptive prose and informative insight into life around the Royal family. Andrew Lownie is a thorough, brilliant researcher and this book definitely deserves its best-selling status. 

This book tells the story of the wars of the Roses through the lens of one family – the Pastons. This family left an extraordinary archive of letters, and it included many fascinating characters, especially women. The Paston women fought off sieges on their houses, wrote Valentine letters to their husbands, ran off with servants, and managed complicated household finances. As a family, the Pastons were social climbers, who tried to get on at court and to improve their position. Through them, we hear about high politics, but also about the domestic life and loves of the gentry in the fifteenth century. In this book, Helen Castor writes a kind of family biography, expansive, gripping, and detailed. It is both first-class research and a great story.

I loved this swashbuckling tale of Shakespeare’s fight master because it took me back to Elizabethan England and right on to the stage at The Globe theater. There’s plenty of action and intrigue (the main character’s not only an actor and fight master but a spy!) that inspired me when I was writing the action scenes in my book. The author fills the pages with an impressive amount of historical detail while maintaining a brisk, page-turning pace.