Lady Jane’s Salon: Leanna Renee Hieber

Next Monday, September 7, will bring a special installment of Lady Jane’s Salon, the monthly romance reading series I’ve been hosting since last February. We’ll be celebrating the publication of The Strangely Beautiful Tale of Miss Percy Parker, the debut novel from Salon co-founder Leanna Renee Hieber. We’ve been looking forward to this party for a long time, and Leanna has all sorts of plans to make it a memorable occasion—so you might come join us at Madame X (94 W. Houston St.) from 7 p.m. onward.

And here, courtesy of the new Lady Jane’s Salon Book Club from RomanceNovel.tv, is Leanna herself, talking about the historical research that went into her magickal Victorian romance tale…

Isabo Kelly, a friend of the Salon from the beginning, will also be reading from her work this evening. So come cap off your Labor Day weekend with a fantastic book party!

30 August 2009 | lady jane's salon |

Hallie Rubenhold Rediscovers the Worsley Affair

Beatrice is perhaps best known for its focus on fiction; however, my taste in romance novels is influenced in no small degree by an interest in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century British history, so biographies of figures from that period will almost certainly catch my eye—such was the case with Hallie Rubenhold‘s The Lady in Red, which UK readers may readily recognize as Lady Worsley’s Whim. But how did Rubenhold hit upon one of the most notorious sex scandals of the 1780s as her subject? It began, she explains, with a painting…

Call it perverse, but as a historian, I’ve never been interested in telling the epic stories. Yes, I find the big ‘set pieces’; the battles and incidents of court intrigue fascinating. I’m enthralled by monarchs and presidents, wars and turning points, but I’m also strongly of the belief that true history lies in the details. It’s the bits that have been left out of the history books that are crying out to be told. It’s the voices that have been silenced or never heard before which require attention. My gut instinct has always been to mine the archives and dig out the rare gems, which is how I came across the story of Sir Richard and Lady Worsley.

At first I found it amazing that no one had written a book about them; Lady Worsley’s portrait, painted by Joshua Reynolds (c. 1780), is perhaps one of his most striking and bold works. The full-length painting (which now hangs at Harewood House, a stately home in the north of England) features its subject adorned in a blazing red riding habit, her hand tightly gripping a riding crop. Needless to say, her defiant and unconventional stance raised as much comment in the eighteenth century as it still does today.

It seemed odd to me that although so many eyes had examined this image, no one had been compelled to discover the story behind it. In fact, very little at all was known about the Worsleys, and what I did find only piqued my curiosity further. According to the portrait’s catalogue entry, Lady Worsley, her husband, and her lover, Captain George Bisset had been embroiled in one of the greatest sex scandals of the eighteenth century.

(more…)

24 August 2009 | guest authors |