Recommended Reading

I promised receipts. Here’s my binder. Don’t hate me I have a Bravo problem. The reunions always bring the drama and when that phone comes out or Heaven forfend the binder full of screenshots you know it’s about to get juicy. We often think of the past especially the distant past as staid or stuffy, but that’s just wrong. Maybe it is just because your history teacher was boring or the textbook was focusing on the sanitized version. Or maybe it is because you can’t imagine putting on quite so many undergarments or layers everyday without feeling a bit constrained. People are people and have been doing naughty things since beginning of time after all none of us would be here if they weren’t having at least a little fun. So here are a few resources I like that back things up. I also try to footnote everything when I mention it and then you can come back to this list to take a deeper dive yourself. I was a history major and I love books. I want everyone to love them too!

The Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England by Venetia Murray

A journalist and novelist that turned to writing social history, this book has an approachable conversational style that is still jam-packed with citations and primary sources. In it she covers many of the details of day to day life of high society that provide the background for all my novels. From clubs and gambling hells to seaside resorts and what all those activities were at country houses and where one stored their mistress, Venetia weaves together first person accounts into a coherent picture of what it was like to be a well-connected member of Regency society. Grab it on Amazon

The Dandy: Brummel to Beerbohm by Ellen Moers

An academic literary critic who focused on feminist scholarship used a great deal of primary sources to bring the Beau and other Regency characters to life in this scholarly but still approachable text. It is available at the amazing resource that the Internet Archive, home of the Wayback Machine. Check it out here The Dandy.

Reminiscences of Captain Gronow

If he hadn’t recorded the catchiest appellation for Almack’s, would his memoirs have stood the test of time? Captain Gronow was a commissioned officer in the Foot Guards and served at Waterloo, but he was also a dandy and not very good at finances. He was an MP but the election involved so much bribery that they nearly dissolved his constituency. An interesting life indeed, but he is immortalized in many a regency conversation by coining Almack’s as the Seventh Heaven of the Fashionable World. His memoirs came towards the end of his life so almost a fifty year remove from the events relevant to our story, but they add a first hand recollection from an imperfect memory and an interesting character. Easily accessible and table of contents to read each small recollection by topic is available for free from the wonderful resource that is the wikimedia foundation here.