Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

I'm a native New Yorker and I've been going to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a long-time. I've done scavenger hunts at the Met, the Costume Institute is like a second home, it's just a very special place, not just for me but for most New Yorkers. So when I heard about the Shady Ladies Tours of the Met (thanks to Instagram), well I had to know more. I mean Scandalous Women are my bread and butter, so finding someone else who loves them as well, well it was a no brainer. The tours are led by Dr. Andrew Lear (that's him on the left),    a leading scholar on the history of sexuality , and  one of the foremost authorities on the erotic in Greek and Roman art. So you know he knows his stuff. The company offers several tours of the Met, including Nasty Women, Shady Ladies, Gay Secrets and Sexy Secrets of the Metropolitan. It was really hard to know which one to pick! I decided on Shady ladies, primarily because it wasn't sold out and I had planned on going to...

Title:   Undercover Girl: The Lesbian Informant Who Helped the FBI Bring Down the Communist Party Author:   Lisa E. Davis Publisher: Publisher: Imagine (May 9, 2017) How acquired:   Edelweiss What it’s About:   At the height of the Red Scare, Angela Calomiris was a paid FBI informant inside the American Communist Party. As a Greenwich Village photographer, Calomiris spied on the New York Photo League, pioneers in documentary photography. While local Party officials may have had their suspicions about her sexuality, her apparent dedication to the cause won them over.  When Calomiris testified for the prosecution at the 1949 Smith Act trial of the Party's National Board, her identity as an informant (but not as a lesbian) was revealed. Her testimony sent eleven party leaders to prison and decimated the ranks of the Communist Party in the US. My thoughts:  When I saw this book on Edelweiss, I immediately clicked the request button. It sounded l...

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...