Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

Spirit of a Dove   The closest rival of Josephine Baker, British siren Evelyn Dove was an international star in the 1920s and 1930s. In his new biography,   Evelyn Dove: Britain’s Black Cabaret Queen , featuring over 50 rare photographs,   Stephen Bourne   reviews a life marked by success, scandal, heartbreak and obscurity.   Evelyn Dove was one of the true pioneers of the booming cabaret age of the 1920s. She thrilled audiences around the world and her exquisite stage costumes helped to make her one of the most glamorous women of her time. Evelyn was a black British siren who toured Europe throughout the 1920s and 1930s, courting admirers and fans wherever she performed. Her mesmerising movie star looks and grace captivated those in her presence. The public and press couldn’t get enough of the rising star who went on to replace Josephine Baker as the star attraction in a revue at the famous Casino de Paris. In 1936, amidst a frenzy of public interest, ...

I've been a member of the Historical Novel Society since 2011 and I have attended conferences both in the US and in London.  Recently, I joined the board planning the 2017 conference in Portland, Oregon.  In the run-up to the conference, I recently had the chance to talk to Faith L. Justice who is the current co-chair of the New York Chapter of HNS. Long-time readers of the blog may remember that Faith wrote a guest post a few years ago about Hypatia. Q) Faith, thank you so much for taking the time to answer a few questions about the New York chapter of HNS.  How did the chapter come about? According to legend (I didn’t join the local chapter until a couple of years ago) there was a Yahoo list serve that was fairly active. Around 2011, someone on the list suggested they get together in person. The first meeting was in a restaurant, the next in a public atrium. They continued to get together in semi-regular fashion with people joining and dropping out until they...

Title:   ENEMIES OF VERSAILLES: A Novel (The Mistresses of Versailles Trilogy) Author:   Sally Christie Publisher:  Atria Books (March 21, 2017) How Acquired: Net Galley/TLC Book Tours Back Cover:   In the final installment of Sally Christie’s “tantalizing” ( New York Daily News ) Mistresses of Versailles trilogy, Jeanne Becu, a woman of astounding beauty but humble birth, works her way from the grimy back streets of Paris to the palace of Versailles, where the aging King Louis XV has become a jaded and bitter old philanderer. Jeanne bursts into his life and, as the Comtesse du Barry, quickly becomes his official mistress. “That beastly bourgeois Pompadour was one thing; a common prostitute is quite another kettle of fish.” After decades of suffering the King's endless stream of Royal Favorites, the princesses of the Court have reached a breaking point. Horrified that he would bring the lowborn Comtesse du Barry into the hallowed halls of Versailles, Lou...

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...

gel·ig·nite ˈjeləɡˌnīt/ noun a high explosive made from a gel of nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose in a base of wood pulp and sodium or potassium nitrate, used particularly for rock blasting. So QEII is finally crowned and we now get to the juicy part of the series, the revelation of Princess Margaret’s relationship with Group Captain Peter Townsend. A reporter at one of the tabloids is working on a story speculating on the relationship between the two. See, he saw the Princess pick a piece of fluff of the Captain’s uniform at the coronation. The editor is not sold, but the reporter insists that where there is smoke, there is fire. Actually he calls the article 'gelignite' since it seems that the name of the episode has to be referenced at least once. Picking the fluff off a man is a gesture even more intimate than a kiss because it suggests that the kissing has already happened. When the owner of the paper is appalled that the editor is planning on running the sto...

Finally we get to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. But first we have the obligatory flashback to 1937. George VI is rehearsing in his office when Princess Elizabeth comes for a visit. He immediately ropes her into playing The Archbishop of Canterbury. It is a lovely scene, not only between father and daughter but also between monarch and future monarch. Jared Harris is so lovely as he explains the word inviolate to her. I don’t know who the young actress who plays the 10 year old Princess but she certainly resembles the real Princess at that age. You can just feel the love between father and daughter. I love the flashbacks because we get to have a glimpse of what the Queen was like as a child and more of her relationships with others like her father. George tries on St. Edward’s crown and we cut to the Queen trying it on.  She asks if she can borrow it for a few days to practice and the man from the Tower looks flabbergasted that she would even ask. He points out that she h...

This episode was all about the Great Smog of 1952 which I had never heard, but was apparently a really big thing.  Having experienced a little bit of London Fog in my lifetime, I can’t imagine what it must have been like to have to deal with the vat of pea soup that was served up in 1952.  I’m not going to lie, this episode felt like a bit of a placeholder, as if the writers wanted to hold off getting to the coronation as long as possible. I wasn’t sure where they were going with it.  What we got was a bit of a deeper glimpse at some of our main characters, particularly Sir Winston Churchill who does not come off very well in this episode. We learn at the beginning of the episode that the whole thing could have been prevented.  Churchill was apparently warned by UK scientists that a great smog was a possibility. Instead, Churchill ignored the warnings by recommending that people continue to burn coal for fuel in an effort to boost the economy. Good intenti...