Beatrice Lacey, as strong-minded as she is beautiful, refuses to conform to the social customs of her time. Destined to lose her family name and beloved Wideacre estate once she is wed, Beatrice will use any means necessary to protect her ancestral heritage. Seduction, betrayal, even murder -- Beatrice's passion is without apology or conscience.
Sumptuously set in Georgian England, Wideacre is intensely gripping, rich in texture, and full of color and authenticity. It is a saga as irresistible in its singular magic as its heroine.
Crowning the extraordinary trilogy that began with Wideacre and The Favored Child, Meridon is a rich, impassioned tapestry of a young woman's journey from dreams to glittering drawing rooms and elaborate deceits...from a simple hope to a deep and fulfilling love. Set in the savage contrasts of Georgian England -- a time alive with treachery, grandeur, and intrigue -- Meridon is Philippa Gregory's masterwork.
Be It Ever So Humble: Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention of the Middle-Class Home
Before the rise of private homes as we now understand them, the realm of personal, private, and local relations in England was the parish, which was also the sphere of poverty management. Between the 1740s and the 1790s, legislators, political economists, reformers, and novelists transferred the parish system’s functions to another institution that promised self-sufficient prosperity: the laborer’s cottage. Expanding its scope beyond the parameters of literary history and previous studies of domesticity, Be It Ever So Humble posits that the modern middle-class home was conceived during the eighteenth century in England, and that its first inhabitants were the poor.
BBC History magazine is an authoritative and informed history publication examining and re-examining key historical events, turning points in history, wider trends within history, and different eras as a whole. It publishes articles written by experts in their field on all periods of history, whether that’s Ancient Egypt, Tudor England, or the Second World War, and brings cutting-edge historical research and new theories to a wider audience in an accessible, engaging format.
A craze for collecting swept England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Aristocrats and middling-sort men alike crammed their homes full of a bewildering variety of physical object. Why were these bizarre jumbles of artifacts so popular? Marjorie Swann demonstrates that collections of physical objects were central to early modern English literature and culture. Swann examines the famous collection of rarities assembled by the Tradescant family; the development of English natural history; narrative catalogs of English landscape features that began to appear in the Tudor and Stuart periods; the writings of Ben Jonson and Robert Herrick; and the foundation of the British Museum.
