Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady

Mistresses: A History of Other Women

Elizabeth Abbott · 510 pages

Author probes the motives and morals of some of history's most infamous and fascinating women. Drawing intimate portraits of those who have--either by chance, coercion or choice--assumed this complex role, from Chinese concubines and European royal mistresses to mobster molls and trophy dolls, Mistresses offers a rich blend of history, personality and cultural study. Historical and biographical p

The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper

Hallie Rubenhold · 352 pages

Unmentionable: The Victorian Lady's Guide to Sex, Marriage, and Manners

Therese Oneill · 313 pages

"A scandalously honest guide to the secrets of Victorian womanhood. "If Unmentionable does not secure the Pulitzer Prize for Most Fascinating Book Ever, the whole gig is rigged. Therese Oneill opens the doors to everything we secretly wanted to know about the Victorian era, but didn't think to ask. Knickers with no crotches? Check. Arsenic as a facial scrub? Check. The infrequency of bathing and t

The Sealed Letter

Emma Donoghue · 416 pages

Emily 'Fido' Faithfull hasn't seen her friend Helen for years. After bumping into her on the streets of Victorian London, Fido finds herself reluctantly helping Helen to have an affair with a young army officer. The women's friendship quickly unravels - and the appearance of a mysterious sealed letter could destroy more than one life.

Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia

Janet Wallach · 419 pages

Reared in the comfortable and privileged world of the "eminent Victorians," Gertrude Bell turned her back on convention and sought adventure in Arab lands. Traveling numerous times through the Syrian Desert and, at risk to her life, through the great Arabian desert of the Nejd - the last European to do so before the eruption of World War I - she wrote of her travels in widely acclaimed books. T

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary

Simon Winchester · 265 pages

The Fishing Fleet: Husband Hunting in the Raj

Anne de Courcy · 352 pages

"The fascinating and entertaining true stories of the young Victorian women on the hunt for husbands among the colonial businessmen and bureaucrats in the Raj"--

The Doctor's Wife

Mary Elizabeth Braddon · 274 pages

With *The Doctor's Wife*, Mary Elizabeth Braddon rewrote Flaubert's Madame Bovary, exploring the heroine's sense of entrapment and alienation in middle-class provincial life. A woman with a secret, adultery, death, and the spectacle of female recrimination and suffering are the elements which combine to make *The Doctor's Wife* a classic women's sensation novel. The novel is also self-consciously

Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King

Antonia Fraser · 416 pages

The self-proclaimed Sun King, Louis XIV ruled over the most glorious and extravagant court in seventeenth-century Europe. Now, Antonia Fraser goes behind the well-known tales of Louis's accomplishments and follies, exploring in detail his intimate relationships with women. The king's mother, Anne of Austria, had been in a childless marriage for 22 years before she gave birth to Louis XIV. A devout

An Inconvenient Wife

Megan Chance · 418 pages

AN INCONVENIENT WIFE is a rich blend of suspense, social history (America in the 1880s), and passion. Chance delivers a powerfully written page-turner about a woman's struggle to escape the confines of her time, class, and gender. Literary historical fiction is an extremely popular genre, as demonstrated by such bestsellers as Matthew Pearl's "The Dante Club (Random House, 2/03) and Michael Fabe

Jude the Obscure

Thomas Hardy · 440 pages

Hardy's last work of fiction, Jude the Obscure is also one of his most gloomily fatalistic, depicting the lives of individuals who are trapped by forces beyond their control. Jude Fawley, a poor villager, wants to enter the divinity school at Christminster. Sidetracked by Arabella Donn, an earthy country girl who pretends to be pregnant by him, Jude marries her and is then deserted. He earns a liv

Serving Victoria: Life in the Royal Household

Kate Hubbard · 417 pages

Serving Victoria follows the lives of six members of her household, from the governess to the royal children, from her maid of honor to her chaplain and her personal physician -- Front jacket flap.

Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President

Candice Millard · 494 pages

James A. Garfield was one of the most extraordinary men ever elected president. Born into abject poverty, he rose to become a wunderkind scholar, a Civil War hero, and a renowned and admired reformist congressman. Nominated for president against his will, he engaged in a fierce battle with the corrupt political establishment. But four months after his inauguration, a deranged office seeker tracked

We Two: Victoria and Albert: Rulers, Partners, Rivals

Gillian Gill

It was the most influential marriage of the nineteenth century--and one of history's most enduring love stories. Traditional biographies tell us that Queen Victoria inherited the throne as a naive teenager, when the British Empire was at the height of its power, and seemed doomed to find failure as a monarch and misery as a woman until she married her German cousin Albert and accepted him as her l

Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England

Neil McKenna · 396 pages

28th April 1870. The flamboyantly dressed Miss Fanny Park and Miss Stella Boulton are causing a stir in the Strand Theatre. All eyes are riveted upon their lascivious oglings of the gentlemen in the stalls. Moments later they are led away by the police. What followed was a scandal that shocked and titillated Victorian England in equal measure.

Thunderstruck

Erik Larson · 480 pages

A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world's "great hush." In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men--Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication--whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy

Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation

Cokie Roberts · 336 pages

In FOUNDING MOTHERS Roberts paid homage to the women who helped establish our nation. In LADIES OF LIBERTY she continues to shed light on remarkable women, but focuses on what they have done to help define the country during the second half of the founding era. Picking up where she left off in her previous book, Roberts examines a totally new set of figures and what these amazing women did to ensu

Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed

Patricia Cornwell · 387 pages

"Between August and November 1888, at least seven women were murdered in London's Whitechapel area. The gruesome nature of their deaths caused panic and fear in the East End for months, and gave rise to the sobriquet that was to become shorthand for a serial killer - Jack the Ripper.". "For over a hundred years the murders have remained among the world's greatest unsolved crimes, and a wealth o

Sex with Kings: 500 Years of Adultery, Power, Rivalry, and Revenge

Eleanor Herman · 287 pages

Throughout the centuries, royal mistresses have been worshiped, feared, envied, and reviled. They set the fashions, encouraged the arts, and, in some cases, ruled nations. Eleanor Herman's Sex with Kings takes us into the throne rooms and bedrooms of Europe's most powerful monarchs. Alive with flamboyant characters, outrageous humor, and stirring poignancy, this glittering tale of passion and poli

The Portrait of a Lady

Henry James · 592 pages

The Portrait of a Lady is widely held to be the outstanding work of Henry James’s “early” period, and among the finest novels of his entire career. When the eccentric Mrs. Touchett “takes up” her charming American niece, Isabel Archer, and returns with her to England, her husband and son, the invalid Ralph, are first mystified, then bemused. Soon, however, they are smitten, as also is their aristo

Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII

Karen Lindsey · 262 pages

Propaganda Girls: The Secret War of the Women in the OSS

Lisa Rogak · 240 pages

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Anne Bronte · 416 pages

**Librarian note: Alternate cover editions for this ISBN are: "Woman in white dress" (with the title on white and black background), "Woman at the easel" on a black and blue background, and "Furniture, easel and window".** ***Anne Brontë's second novel is a passionate and courageous challenge to the conventions supposedly upheld by Victorian society and reflected in circulating-library fiction.

Charles Dickens

Claire Tomalin · 600 pages

When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength o