Join the Duchess and Lady on their latest read, The Runaway Duchess!

Ok so this takes place in the late 1800s - specifically 1883. This was the height of colonialism and a lot of that colonialism looked like - stealing things from other places. In this book, Neal was essentially a botanical adventurer.

Botanical expeditions during the 18th and 19th centuries were often state-sponsored endeavors aimed at cataloging and exploiting the flora of colonized territories. These collections were not merely scientific pursuits but were deeply intertwined with colonial objectives, including economic exploitation and the assertion of imperial dominance.

In the 1800s, the demand for exotic bird feathers in Europe spurred extensive hunting and trade, often involving Indigenous peoples and enslaved individuals as collectors. This trade was integral to the fashion industry, with feathers adorning hats and garments, symbolizing status and exoticism. The exploitation of bird populations led to significant ecological disruptions and the endangerment of various species.​ And a shoutout to one of my favorite nonbookish pods - True Crime Campfire which did a wicked cool case about a feather heist. I will put it in our sources.

Sources:

True Crime Campfire, Bird Brain: The Great Feather Heist

Biodiversity Heritage Blog - No Egrets: The Story of Fashion and Feathers Through Books

Cornell Library - Fashion and Feathers

Museum Victoria - Flight of fashion: when feathers were worth twice their weight in gold

In the 1800s, the fashion industry’s obsession with feathers drove some bird species to extinction.

I didn’t use this source but found this article super interesting: The Guardian - ‘We need other logics for our approach to nature’: the woman uprooting colonialism in botany.

Intro Music: Musopen; Violin Concerto in F major, RV 293 'Autumn' - III. Allegro https://musopen.org/music/14910-the-four-seasons-op-8/

Join Duchess Katie & Lady Sadie as the venture in to the world of medieval historical romance!

• New author background
  • Susan King was born in 1951 and has been publishing since the 1990s
  • Has also published under the nom de plume Sarah Gabriel, Susan Fraser King
  • Has worked as a lecturer in medieval history with a background in studio art, medieval english and now is a teacher at a private school.
  • Runs a very fun blog called the Word Wenches with some other more 90s romance authors
• Historic highlights
  • Takes place between Scotland and England during the 1300s
  • Set during what is known as the First Scottish War of Independence. This lasted from 1296 under 1328. Yes - a total of 32 years and 34 days. The wars were caused by the attempts of the English kings to grab territory by claiming sovereignty over Scotland while Scots fought to keep English rule and authority out of Scotland. I know it is shocking that the English never walked into places and declared that they were now in charge… the committed brutal atrocities and treated many of the prisoners of war so badly that they were actually censured by the Pope.
  • This is the same war that has Robert the Bruce - a side character in this book and William Wallace of Braveheart fame. Because nothing says Scottish patriotism like an anti semitic Australian? So I don’t recommended you watch that if you haven’t seen it, but I will recommend the Netflix film Outlaw King from 2018. It has a pretty awesome cast of Chris Pine and Florence Pugh.

FantasticFiction - Susan King

WordWenches

SusanFraserKing.com

OutlawKingIMDB

NQHigherScottishWarsofIndependence

BBC-WarsofIndepdence

Intro Music: Musopen; Violin Concerto in F major, RV 293 'Autumn' - III. Allegro https://musopen.org/music/14910-the-four-seasons-op-8/

Join Duchess Katie & Lady Sadie as they dive into the world of historical BDSM

1. For those of us that we raised in a school system that doesn’t talk about colonialism… I know it is shocking but in 1910 Great Britain owned Egypt. By 1922 Egypt will be an independent nation.

1. 1910 is a wild time in the world anyways. There is a lot of colonialism in this book - I mean the cast are all expats or colonizers themselves. There is a lot of the energy that will lead to the xenophobia and nationalism that is the cause of the first world war. This doesn’t directly deal with any of that but it is the backdrop.

2. I went down a rabbit hole on salons in Cairo:

1. HIGHPOINTS: A Palestinian immigrant named May Elias Ziade hosted a wildly popular Salon and corresponded with the brilliant poet Kahlil Gibran.
2. I also learned that the first literary salon was in the Arab world to a ruler named Suayna Bint Husayn and it is highly likely that it then hit seventeenth century europe.
3. There were a lot of salons in Cairo - and one that was hosted by a woman named May Elias Ziade, She was originally from Palestine to a Born in Palestine to a Palestinian father and a Lebanese mother. Ziadeh attended school in her native city and in Lebanon, before immigrating along with her family to Egypt in 1908. She started publishing her works in French (under the pen name Isis Copia) in 1911, and Kahlil Gibran entered into a correspondence with her in 1912. Being a prolific writer, she wrote for Arabic-language newspapers and periodicals, along with publishing poems and books.
4. The history of the literary salon in the Arab world, of which little is known, dates back far longer than one would expect. Sukayna bint Husayn (735 / 743), began running her salon centuries during the Umayyad dynasty, well before the idea was first introduced to seventeenth century Europe.She was a highly regarded woman of great intelligence, and an expert in fashion and literature. She was the first woman to open her house to male and female guests, and organised evenings of music, literary criticism, and poetry

3. ONE LAST THING: so i adore old planes and my dad was in a flying circus back in the day but I just had to mention that Bleriot was a real inventor/ aviator and was the first to fly over the English Channel and (almost) land. He did survive his many many crashes and went on to design more planes. He also worked closely with Voison which is the designer for the very real human that shows up - Raymonde de Laroche. Who will actually die in her own tragic crash just nine years after this book

Cari Silverwood Website

Fantastic Fiction

National Archives

WebArchive

Intro Music: Musopen; Violin Concerto in F major, RV 293 'Autumn' - III. Allegro https://musopen.org/music/14910-the-four-seasons-op-8/

Join Duchess Katie & Lady Sadie as they discuss "The Finest Print" by Erin Langston!

Fun fact - most British pubs are named like the duck and dog because so much of the population was illiterate for so long that was the only way for people to know the names of places.

“These factors led to greater production of books, newspapers, magazines and ephemera than ever before. Between 1800 and 1835, twenty-five thousand titles were published in Britain; between 1835 and 1862, this figure more than doubled, at 64,000. In 1801, the number of copies of stamped newspapers was 16 million, but by 1849 newspapers numbered at 78 million. Still, books weren’t cheap enough for everyone to be buying them for their own collections. The ‘triple decker’ novel of the early nineteenth century, published in three volumes, might cost between fifteen and eighteen shillings - over half the weekly wage of a printer, and nearly all of a teacher’s. Even the cheaper yellowbacks weren’t appealing to everyone as a purchase item.”

Ironically the fastest way to help the population of England start to learn to read wasn’t education but lending libraries. “Circulating libraries like Mudie’s often satisfied more ‘popular’ tastes, and offered cheaper subscriptions for varying periods. Philanthropic efforts resulted in libraries for the benefit of the working classes, such as the Mechanics’ Institutes. However, working class readers also pooled their resources to purchase texts of their own choice, setting up reading rooms and libraries within their own communities”

On the note of Ethan Fletcher’s Debt: using an inflation calculator £100 in 1850 is equivalent in purchasing power to about £17,203.29 today and then if I exchanged pound sterling to US dollars today it is actually $21000.91.

Reference to a book on sexual health - it is a real book and Langston discusses it in her research section which I had so much fun with! It was a book called What is love? Or Every woman’s book. Published in 1826 and it discussed contraceptives! This was unusual but actually pretty readily available AND IT WAS literally published at the real 62 fleet street. Later in 1918 Marie Carmicheal Stopes wrote Married Love which also helped women “enjoy intercourse” and essentially discussed organsms as well as birth control.

Sources:

Asylum Libraries

Intro Music: Musopen; Violin Concerto in F major, RV 293 'Autumn' - III. Allegro https://musopen.org/music/14910-the-four-seasons-op-8/