Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

Scandalous Women is please to welcome author Deborah Hale to the blog. After a decade spent tracing her ancestors to their roots in Georgian-era Britain, Deborah Hale learned a great deal about the period and uncovered enough fascinating true stories to inspire her fiction plots for years to come. In 1997, Deborah won Romance Writers of Amercia's Golden Heart award and several months later sold her winning manuscript to Harlequin Historical. Since then she has written many historical romance novels with a variety of settings, as well as two other-world fantasies for Luna Books. In the pilot episode of the hit television series "Hustle" one of Deborah's books was used in a key scene! Deborah lives in beautiful Nova Scotia, Canada, a place steeped in history and romance. As Elizabeth Charles , she is the author of the new historical fiction novel CONFESSIONS OF A COURTESAN which came out in 2011 about the 18th century courtesan, Elizabeth Armitage. Welcome Debora...

“I loved him so much I would ski down Mount Everest naked with a carnation up my nose for the love of that man.” – Joyce McKinney The story of Joyce McKinney and the Manacled Mormon sounds like a Quentin Tarantino film or an episode of South Park. It’s almost unbelievable that the story actually happened; that it wasn’t something that was made up by the National Enquirer or the Globe like all those Big Foot sightings or Bat Boy. They say that truth is stranger than fiction and it is certainly true in this bizarre story of one beauty queen’s obsessive love for a pudgy Mormon missionary. In McKinney’s version she was just trying to save the man she loved from the mind-bending control of a religious cult. In Anderson’s more horrific tale, McKinney held him hostage for 3 days in a remote Devon cottage, chained him to a bed and forced him to have sex with her. Thirty-five years later the story continues to baffle and to titillate, most recently in Errol Morris’s latest docume...

Title: The Queen’s Vow - A Novel of Isabella of Castile Author C.W. Gortner (The Confessions of Catherine de Medici, The Last Queen) Publisher: Ballantine Books (Random House) Pub Date:  June 12, 2012 What it’s about: The book covers Isabella’s life from the age of 3 when her father King Juan dies to 1492, when as we all know, Columbus sailed the ocean blue. Isabella, her mother, and her younger brother Alfonso are forced to flee after her father’s death to a remote castle in Spain, to keep them safe from those who might seek to get rid of Alfonso. When Isabella is barely a teenager, she and her brother are taken from their mother’s home to live under the watchful eye of their half-brother, King Enrique, and his sultry, conniving queen Juana of Portugal. There, Isabella is thrust into danger when she becomes an unwitting pawn in a plot to dethrone Enrique. Suspected of treason and held captive, she has to walk a tight rope, torn between her loyalty to her half-b...

Natalie Barney painted by her mother Alice Pike Barney Natalie Barney (1876-1972) was probably one of the most fascinating and maddening woman of the 19 th and early 20 th century. She was a great seductress whose list of conquests sounds like a who’s who of the Belle Époque, Collette, the poet Renee Vivien, the painter Romaine Brooks, Dolly Wilde, the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, just to name a few. Although her epic love life alone would be enough for a place in the history books, Natalie was much more than just a female Casanova. She was also a writer, playwright, and poet who held a salon for more than 60 years on Paris’s Left Bank, which brought together artists from around the world. Barney was a bridge between the Parisian community and the ex-pats who flocked to Paris particularly after WWI. She was what you might call a facilitator. She also worked to promote women writers by founding a “Women’s Academy” in response to the all-male French Academy. Like G...

Hysteria (2012) Directed by: Tanya Wexler Written by: Jonah Lisa Dyer, Stephen Dyer, Howard Gensler Running Time: 95 minutes Cast Felicity Jones as Emily Dalrymple Maggie Gyllenhaal as Charlotte Dalrymple Hugh Dancy as Dr. Mortimer Granville Rupert Everett as Lord Edmund St. John-Smythe Jonathan Pryce as Dr. Robert Dalrymple Ashley Jensen as Fanny Anna Chancellor as Mrs. Bellamy Gemma Jones as Lady St. John-Smythe Malcolm Rennie as Lord St. John-Smythe Tobias Menzies as Mr. Squyers Sheridan Smith as Molly the Lolly Kim Criswell as Mrs. Castellari What it’s about: The film, set in the Victorian era, is about the invention of the vibrator . The film's title refers to the once common medical diagnosis of female hysteria. Dr. Mortimer Granville gets fired from yet another hospital after he questions the father old-fashioned medical techniques of his superior who doesn‘t believe in the existence of germs. Granville moves in wi...

Title: THE QUEEN’S LOVER Author: Francine du Plessix Gray Publisher: Penguin Pub Date: June 14, 2012 　 About the author: Francine du Plessix Gray has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker and is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction, including Simone Weil, At Home with the Marquis de Sade: A Life, Rage and Fire, Lovers and Tyrants, and Soviet Women. She is most recently the author of the memoir Them: A Memoir of Parents . She lives in Connecticut. What it’s about:   The Queen's Lover begins at a masquerade ball in Paris in 1774, when the dashing Swedish nobleman Count Axel von Fersen first meets the mesmerizing nineteen-year-old Dauphine, Marie Antoinette. This electric encounter launches a lifelong romance that will span the course of the French Revolution. The affair begins in friendship, however, and Fersen quickly becomes a devoted companion to the entire royal family. As he roams the halls of Versailles and visits the ...

Sometimes you find the most interesting things in the oddest places.  For example, I was perusing Time Out New York at work today (because I was bored) when I saw an ad for The Lincoln Center Festival.  What really caught my eye was the title Emilie.  For some reason, I just assumed that it had to be about one of my favorite Scandalous Women, Emilie du Chatelet.  And I was right.  Here is the description: Émilie is a modern one-singer, multimedia tour de force about an extraordinary woman: French Enlightenment thinker Émilie du Châtelet. Émilie was many things: the brilliant physicist who first defined kinetic energy; mistress to Voltaire, among other luminaries; a prodigious mathematician and the translator of Newton’s Principia Mathematica; the author of a treatise on the happiness of women; a pioneer of what are now called financial derivatives, which she invented in part to pay off a $1 million debt to card sharks accrued in an unlucky night gambling—...