Books like One Leg

This book provides a helpful overview of the marriage and divorce laws of England during the period in question, as well as twelve “case studies,” all useful for research. Most of the marital breakups covered in this volume occurred before the Regency era, a few even before the greater Georgian era. Each story takes a reader through the heartache and drama of these unhappy marriages and the legal machinations needed to end them. 

An early novella of mine has the indignant heroine rushing to save a woman from a wife sale at a seedy inn. The enormous cost of legally ending a marriage in the Regency put divorce out of the reach of all but the very wealthy. For the poor, and perhaps the drunks, like Thomas Hardy’s hero in The Mayor of Casterbridge, there was another option for ending a marriage, one with a long though not very respectable tradition. Yes, some Englishmen sold their wives! This book covers the peculiarities of this poor man’s method of ending an unhappy marriage. 

Divorce is good fodder for drama and can be employed in different ways in fiction. In this second-chance Regency romance, the reunited lovers are divorced. Convinced by his duplicitous mother of his wife’s infidelity, the hero, a duke divorced his wife and left her penniless. The heroine’s only income is an allowance from her brother, which he ends in a fit of pique when her scandal impacts his marital prospects. (Divorce in this era might shame the entire family). Forced to earn a living, the heroine takes employment as a cook at an inn, where her former husband encounters her and is shocked at how far she has fallen. Read this book to see how the perils of divorce—and remarriage—are dramatized by a skilled romance writer. 

Yes, that says “bedding” and not “wedding”! In this Regency Romance novel, the heroine is a scandalous divorcee who’s sworn off romance. She has some income of her own and isn’t penniless. Dipping a toe into society again, she’s wooed by a determined young rake who wants only to bed her. But when he falls in love and proposes, she has to say no. [Spoiler alert] Her abusive former husband paid a man to perjure her as an adulteress so he could divorce her. The story shows the vindictiveness a spurned husband might employ in this era: the divorce decree leaves her forbidden to remarry. Read this book for a different take on the perils of divorce by another skilled romance writer.

Jenny Blackhurst is a beautiful writer who is known for different POVs and timelines.

This book is addictive and the author will have you turning more pages into the night to finish just one more chapter. The book is based in Wales which is not too far from where I live so that was interesting for me.

The MC is the daughter of a killer who is in prison for murdering her childhood best friend. Many years later another child is abducted with the same signature/patter as the MCs best friend from the past. The MC is compelled to investigate this further.  

I was delighted when I was recently given this book written by Helen Rappaport with the Foreword by Daisy Goodwin, novelist and screenwriter of the TV dramatization of Queen Victoria’s early reign.

The book touches on her birth and carries through to a rather depressing childhood. Still, her letters and journals make fascinating reading and give early insights into the sometimes stubborn character of young Queen Victoria. There are many letters to her Uncle Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, who eventually became instrumental in guiding his nephew, Albert, towards marriage to Victoria.

The book also shows her reliance on her first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, who helped her overcome many difficulties early in her reign. It shows her dislike of her mother’s friend, Sir John Conroy, who had ambitions of becoming regent to the crown, though Victoria quickly scotched that aim.

Passages of letters from her, those to her, and her journals… show more.

Blanc discovered in the National Archives in Paris a remarkable cache of letters kept in an old tin labelled as the property of Fouquier-Tinville, the Public Prosecutor of the French revolutionary Tribunal. He was a man who in sending off the last batch of victims to be beheaded, even after hearing that Robespierre was dead and with him, the Terror, said ‘justice must run its course’

The letters, written by prisoners on the eve of their own execution, to wife, family, plangent pleas to be remembered – some containing a little keepsake: a shirt stud, maybe – were never delivered, but, on Fouquier’s order, impounded as possible evidence. Post mortem? What was the point? The letters are heart-rending, sad, pathetic, drained of hope, but as poignant a souvenir of the effect of the vicious law which was sending their authors to the scaffold as any you will read. Fouquier, whose… show more.

You and I are recently witnessing the popular upheaval in France as a result of the chronic reduction of the purchasing power.

A new story? Ha, no! The French Revolution was about the same thing at the same place: making ends meet. Anatole France takes us through a particular subject within the Revolutionary Tribunal, where the trials of the bourgeoisie should end in bloody executions.

It is very interesting to get under the skin of those jurors to understand why uprisings happen. I can easily see why people seek revenge without any conscience. The ambiance is captivating, the plot is pulling.

This book depicts the violence and devastation of the ‘Reign of Terror’ (a period of extreme violence during the French Revolution) with breathtaking power. It weaves into it a tale that grips, convinces, and profoundly moves the reader. If one is looking to understand human nature and its true depth of depravity, look to no other book.

At the celebrations on 14 July 1790 for the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, Louis XVI took an oath to work with the National Assembly as a constitutional monarch. Less than a year later, on 20 June 1791, the royal family tried to flee the Revolution. The king’s flight convinced masses of French people that he was a perjurer: the monarchy never recovered its mystique.

In contrast, his capture near the border with Luxembourg convinced the crowned heads of Europe that the royal family was in mortal danger. Ten months later France was at war with Marie-Antoinette’s native Austria, and Europe was engulfed in a generation of bloodshed. The great American historian of the Revolution, Timothy Tackett, recounts the engrossing story of the botched flight and its repercussions for a cast of unforgettable characters.