Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

Happy March everyone! Today is also the first day of Women's History Month.  I know it has been quite a while since I've blogged and I apologize profusely. It has been hard lately juggling a job with working on my own writing as well as blogging.  And I know that I still owe recaps of the last 5 episodes of The Crown! I thought I would kick off this month by talking a little bit about Queen Elizabeth's however many times great-grandmother Queen Victoria, the 2nd longest ruling monarch in British History. This January saw the debut of a new series on PBS entitled appropriately enough VICTORIA starring Jenna Coleman as a young Queen Victoria in the first years of her reign.  Author Daisy Goodwin, who was the driving force behind the series, also wrote the novel VICTORIA which came out last fall. I had the privilege of reading an ARC of the novel thanks to Net Galley. And what a wonderful novel it was. While I enjoyed Goodwin's first novel THE AMERICAN DUCHESS, I was n...

Since I still had a few vacation days left this year, I decided to hop a plane to London for a few days, to see some friends but also to see 2 exhibits that I didn't want to miss.  The first one was the Enchanted Princesses exhibit at Kensington Palace, the 2nd was The First Actresses exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on Charing Cross Road.  The National Portrait Gallery is hands down my favorite museum in London, and The First Actresses exhibit didn't disappoint.  It was a tad expensive, 11 pounds, and the exhibition wasn't huge, but as a former actress, I found it fascinating to see the portraits of women I had only read about in theatre history.  There were many women whose portraits I had never seen before including Moll Davis, the other actress who had the privilege of sharing Charles II's bed for a brief time. From the web-site:  The First Actresses presents a vivid spectacle of femininity, fashion and theatricality in seventeenth and eighteent...

The Young Victoria screenplay by Julian Fellowes directed by Jean-Marc Vallee Produced by Graham King, Martin Scorsese, Sarah, Duchess of York, and Tim Headington. Principal Cast: Emily Blunt as Queen Victoria Rupert Friend as Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha Miranda Richardson as Princess Victoria, Duchess of Kent Mark Strong as Sir John Conroy Jim Broadbent as King William IV Harriet Walter as Queen Adelaide Paul Bettany as William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne Thomas Kretschmann as King Leopold I of Belgium Jeanette Hain as Baroness Louise Lehzen Julian Glover as Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington Michael Maloney as Sir Robert Peel Michiel Huisman as Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha I've been waiting it seems like forever to see this film. And I'm not the only one. Evangeline from Edwardian Promenade  (where you can see the trailer), as well as Heather from the Duchess of Devonshire's Gossip Guide and Susan from Writer of Queens h...