cacakerbamakhlukpolitik

In an ideal world, this post today would be on early aviation. When I was researching The Ashford Affair , I spent a fair amount of time looking into the early days of airplanes-- or aeroplanes-- with special attention to the aviation scene among the expat crowd in Kenya, since one of my main characters, my anti-heroine, Bea, was engaged in learning how to fly, following in the footsteps of Beryl Markham and Denys Finch-Hatton. Among other things, I found some hysterical videos from the 1930s (a little later than my period, but still fun) on the care and use of your private plane for the average English girl.  Seriously. This not being an ideal world, other events intervened.  Ironically, my having a plane to catch in an hour has something to do with it-- although I certainly won't be flying it myself. So, instead, with apologies, I offer you something that just popped up in my inbox yesterday: the first chapter of The Ashford Affair audio edition, hot off the soundwaves: (Th...

Jabez Banks, Jr. In the recent post about the Mendenhall Mob I wrote about how nice it is to occasionally get a glimpse into the everyday lives of the 19th Century residents of Mill Creek Hundred, and how helpful it can be to come across something from their lives with which we can easily relate. Assuming that everyone has at one time received a party invitation, I have another example. A few months back I was given an envelope containing items relating to three events, all of which once belonged to an ancestor of the donor. There are two party invitations and one commencement program and ticket, all once belonging to a MCH native named Jabez Banks (1855-1927). If the name sounds vaguely familiar, Jabez was mentioned briefly in the post about his brother, the local automotive pioneer Richard Banks . He was the son of Jabez and Jane Banks, English immigrants who settled originally in Christiana Hundred in the 1840's. In 1850 they were living in the area just west of Wilmington, nea...

Last weekend I was up in Portland with Delilah Marvelle and Jenn LeBlanc working on a cover shoot (yes, Illustrated Romance now has period accurate stock photos for Georgian, Regency, and Victorian books, go get 'em!). On top of having a great time doing that, I got to go to Powell's Books. Aside from the fact that they didn't have single copy of my books--new or used!--it's a pretty amazing place and I went a bit nuts before dialing it back. Even though I know I can find most books nowadays on either Amazon or AbeBooks, there's something about the thrill of discovery while browsing that just can't be beat. I found a hardback copy of THE PRODIGAL RAKE (would anyone like my paper copy? I'll give it to anyone who asks for it in the comments), THE ENGLISHMAN'S CASTLE (sort of a giant love letter to the English concept of home and hearth), MAYFAIR: A TOWN WITHING LONDON (a book I've been looking for for years), THE MODE IN COSTUME (a book my mom had when...

The Bride and the Bandit is a light-hearted western romance by the author of Gauchos & Gumption .  The story features an imaginative small-town librarian in Maple Falls, Oregon, who is writing a summer theatrical, "The Trials of Cleopatra," and the undercover detective who comes to town, posing as a photographer, and ends up playing Antony to her Cleopatra, capturing the notorious Black Bandit, and falling in love---all in one summer.

General outline of the Red Clay Creek Corridor Park area In the mid-1970's, New Castle County found itself in possession of two properties in a state of flux, and it had to decide exactly what to do with them. One property -- Brandywine Springs Park -- had recently been acquired from the state, and the county was still trying to figure out what to do with it. The other property -- Greenbank Park -- had been the site of the County Workhouse (prison), which had just recently been torn down. The site was to become a county park, but what kind of park was still very much up in the air. As we all know, what ultimately happened to these sites was that Brandywine Springs stayed as a low-key, wooded park with a few ball fields and picnic pavilions, while Greenbank became an open sports-oriented space with ball fields and tennis, handball, and basketball courts. Unknown to most (or at least until recently, to me), there was at least one other potential plan floating around during those...

The battle of Waterloo may have ended the major fighting in the Napoleonic Wars, but it was far from bringing an end to the simmering tensions of the past quarter century. When Napoleon escaped from the field at Waterloo, Louis XVIII was still in exile in Ghent. Much of the negotiating for France in the immediate aftermath of the battle was done by two men whose careers had been closely intertwined with that of Napoleon Bonaparte and with the Revolution - Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord and Joseph Fouché. Prince Talleyrand, Napoleon's former foreign minister (though he had left office well before Napoleon's exile)  had survived in the first Bourbon restoration to represent France at the Congress of Vienna and had not rejoined Napoleon when Bonaparte escaped from Elba. Fouché, Napoleon's minister of police for much of his rule, had worked with the Allies against Napoleon in 1814 but then rejoined Napoleon after his escape from Elba and served as his minister of police...

My new novel, The Ashford Affair , comes out in just a bit over a month, on April 9th. This was a departure for me. After years of writing books set in 1803 and 1804, I had moved a hundred years up into a whole new realm: Edwardian, World War I, and 1920s England. When beginning a new book, I always like to start with real people to use as models for my characters: after all, if someone else trod that same path in that same time, it makes me confident that my characters are in sync with their era. In the case of The Ashford Affair , my two main historical characters, Addie and Bea, have grown up in a great house in the English countryside: Addie the poor cousin, Bea the beloved daughter of the house. Both of them find their lives interrupted by World War I, which hits just as they’re starting to think about their debuts (or, at least, Bea is!). One of the main inspirations for The Ashford Affair was Frances Osborne’s The Bolter , about her much-married great-grandmother, whose l...

Kiamensi Road House This one is much less of a normal blog post for me, and more of just a picture gallery. The photos below are of a house on Kiamensi Road, just east of Stanton Road. It stands almost directly across from the entrance to Powell Ford County Park. I don't really have very many concrete facts about the house at present, so a few educated guesses will have to suffice. Needless to say, if more information about the property does surface, I'll definitely pass it along. Judging from its style, the house was probably built sometime in the 1870's or 1880's, and was almost certainly connected to the Kiamensi Woolen Mill just down the hill along Red Clay Creek. During that era, the mill employed dozens of workers and had surrounding it a small village, which probably extended most of the way from Stanton Road to the Red Clay. By 1888, Scharf states that the company owned 26 dwellings, although it's unclear (to me, at least) whether this is solely at Kiamens...

  White’s: A (very) Short History As described by Percy Colson in his book White’s 1693-1950 . White’s began as White’s Chocolate House on the site of what was to become Boodle’s. By the Regency period it had moved several times and finally settled at the location it currently occupies on St. James’s Street and the Young Club and the Old Club had combined their membership (1781), ending the two-tiered system that had been in place for nearly forty years, during which all members elected to the Old Club had to first be members of the Young Club). The manager was Benjamin Martindale (son of John Martindale, who had been manager before him) until 1812, when he was succeeded by George Raggett (who was more of a businessman than his predecessors and immediately set about raising the cost of membership and dunning members for dues that were in arrears). A typical night at White’s described c. 1743: “Dinner say at seven o’clock play all night, one man unable to sit in his chair at three o...

The Aaron Klair House There were a number of reasons why I started writing this blog 2-1/2 years ago, one of them being to help combat what I felt was a common misperception. (I know I've said this before, but it bears repeating in this case.) I think that when a lot of people are asked, about Mill Creek Hundred, "What was around here 100, 200, or 300 years ago?", the common response would be, "Oh, it was all just farmland." And as we've seen here, that dismissive phrase is just not accurate. Although to be fair, even though MCH has been home to many other things over the centuries, the great majority of its expanse has been primarily used as farmland. But with those farms, it's important to bear in mind that they were built, lived on, and worked by real people . I know that sounds on the surface like a simplistic idea ( of course there were "real" people there), but it's one I feel gets overlooked sometimes. I think the main reason it...