Watch This: Lost in Austen

Fancy meeting you here…..
There’s nothing deep or literary about Lost in Austen. It’s a time travel tale that incorporates all the standard glitches, as 21st century Amanda tries to navigate her way around the style and conventions of the 19th century. Because she curls up with Austen every time she feels stressed, Amanda [...]

Historical Fiction: The Postmistress, by Sarah Blake

**** The Letter
On the eve of America’s entry into the second World War, three women struggle with the changes that will inevitably alter their lives. The eponymous postmistress, middle aged Iris, has reason to hope that love will at long last be hers. Emma is a young, naive bride, whose husband, an MD, suddenly decides that [...]

Monday Morning Poem: Requiescat

by Oscar Wilde

Tread lightly, she is near
Under the snow,
Speak gently, she can hear
The daisies grow.
All her bright golden hair
Tarnished with rust,
She that was young and fair
Fallen to dust.
Lily-like, white as snow,
She hardly knew
She was a woman, so
Sweetly she grew.
Coffin-board, heavy stone,
Lie on her breast;
I vex my heart alone,
She is at rest.
Peace, peace, she cannot [...]

Watch This: The Tudors, season 2

It’s TV, not a history lesson, and The Tudors, Season 2 delivers good period drama, with plenty of courtly plotting. Natalie Dormer brings grit and moxie to her role as Anne Boleyn, and while Henry VIII was a bit older than Rhys-Meyers appears, it’s amazing to watch as the king slides into the megalomania that [...]

Watch This: Lorna Doone

Civil war
R.D. Blackmore’s  classic Lorna Doone is a particularly dense novel, containing hundreds of characters and a lot of country philosophizing.    This sort of work is not easy to translate to the screen, but there are more than enough adventure, brawling, and love scenes to do the trick. Writer Adrian Hodges has remained true to [...]

Literary Fiction: Innocent Blood, by P.D. James

A failure of love
Written in 1980, Innocent Blood is the first of P.D. James’s few stand alone novels. No detectives here, and more secrets than mysteries. Philippa Palfrey is the spoiled adopted child of a wealthy, emotionally barren couple. Although she was eight years old at the time she was taken in, Philippa [...]

It’s a Mystery: A Likeness in Stone, by Julia Wallis Martin

Water and stone
A twenty year old cold case heats up quickly when a recreational diver discovers the victim’s skeleton, in the closet of a submerged house in a geographically isolated reservoir. The detective who reluctantly closed the case, DCI Driver, knows who killed the victim, but failed at the time to turn up sufficient [...]

Historical Fiction: The Lady Elizabeth, by Alison Weir

The girl who would be queen
Historian Alison Weir weaves her considerable knowledge about the early life of Elizabeth Tudor into an enchanting novel about the girl who would be queen. Born into the most powerful family in the land, the upbringing of the daughter of Henry VIII was anything but a bed of [...]

Classic Lit: Lorna Doone, by R.D. Blackmore

4.0 out of 5 stars John’s coming of age
As a very young child, John Ridd encounters the equally young Lorna while fishing in Doone territory. The Doones, born noble, were deprived of their birthright, and now live in a fortress above the Somerset moors, sometimes emerging to pillage the countryside for food, money, and [...]

Historical Fiction: The Wet Nurse’s Tale, by Erica Eisendorfer

Working woman
Susan Rose has been brought up by an abusive drunk of a father and a mother forced into wet-nursing to keep hearth and home together. When Susan, in service at the manor house, finds herself pregnant by the master’s son, she is forced by her father into following in her mother’s footsteps, only [...]