Emily Brand

Top 5 Austen-inspired Nonfiction Book of the Year - Austenprose.com Inspired by the works of Jane Austen, the amusingly tongue-in-cheek Mr Darcy's Guide to Courtship is written from the perspective of Pride and Prejudice's Mr. Darcy and closely based on real Regency advice manuals. It is a hilarious and irreverent picture of the social mores of the period and of how men thought about women – and sheds amusing light on men of the modern age, too! Readers can dip into different sections for Darcy's views on a myriad of issues, including "What Females Want", "The Deceptions of Beautiful Women" and “Winning Their Affections, Flattery, Making Conversation, and Flirting!" Also included are sections written by Pride and Prejudice's Miss Caroline Bingley and Mr Darcy's correspondence with famous Regency figures including the Duke of Wellington.

The Secrets of Seduction from Jane Austen’s Most Eligible Bachelor

Mr Darcy’s Guide to Courtship

Surveys Great Britain's royal weddings for the past thousand years, including the traditions, scandals, festivities, politics, and the effect of changing attitudes towards marriage on the event.

Royal Weddings

Fitzwilliam Darcy's universally acknowledged primer for single men in possession of a good fortune, should they be in want of a wife. Mr Darcy's Guide to Courtship is no ordinary Regency courtship manual, composed as it is by a Fitzwilliam Darcy as yet unmellowed by contact with Elizabeth Bennet. Full of entirely justified pride and meticulously cultivated prejudice, Jane Austen's most famous (and most fancied) hero here reveals the secrets of his success with the opposite sex, offering hints to both ladies and gentlemen on the rules of courtship, including making oneself agreeable, identifying an appropriate partner and how to escape the unwanted attentions of rogues and fortune-hunters. *Also includes: beauty tips from Caroline Bingley, thoughts on the improper courtship techniques of Messrs Wickham and Collins, reflections on spinsterhood by Miss Emma Woodhouse, and Darcy's advice to his many illustrious correspondents including Lord Byron, the Duke of Wellington and Mr Willoughby of Combe Magna.*

It is safe to say that selling sex constituted a significant, and visible, part of urban culture in Georgian England. Alongside the rise of the 'polite society' of Jane Austen's novels, the city of London, so described in 1758, had long been portrayed as a centre of vice and debauchery. In the shadows of the fashionable public parks and gardens, in alleyways along the banks of the Thames, even at church doors, there lurked a world of criminality and prostitution for which the bawdyhouse became one of the most potent symbols. The book will explore what is was like to run, work in, and frequent these establishments, which ranged from the filthy East End hovel to grand upmarket apartments. Through newspaper reports, criminal trials, political speeches and bawdy pamphlets and prints, it will also explore how they were perceived and, as the nineteenth century dawned, how the threat of disease and Victorian prudery meant that they were increasingly feared by the public and controlled by the legal system - and the 'happy hooker' firmly confined to the past.

The Georgian Bawdyhouse

Royal nuptials are always a cause for excitement both at home and abroad, and never more so than when the couple in question are young, glamorous and bathed in the glow of genuine romance. But the meaning invested in royal weddings, and the manner in which they are conducted, have changed dramatically as ideals have shifted about the monarchy and about marriage itself. This book charts almost a thousand years of British royal weddings, from Henry I – whose bride was believed by many to be a runaway nun – through Henry VIII's six attempts at matrimony, to the highly public weddings of recent years and the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton. It explores the traditions, symbols and rituals of the ceremonies themselves as well as the popular festivities and commemorative wares that have become a central means of marking the event.

THE SUNDAY TIMES LITERATURE BOOKS OF THE YEAR MAIL ON SUNDAY BOOK OF THE YEAR BBC HISTORY BOOK OF THE YEAR THE RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Delectable ... a ravishing family saga' Sunday Times 'Brings to life the colourful characters of the Georgian era's most notorious families with all the verve and skill of the era's finest novelists ... A powdered and pomaded, sordid and silk-swathed adventure' Hallie Rubenhold 'A chocolate box full of delicious gothic delights - jump in' Lucy Worsley 'Brand is a great historian, equal to the huge challenge of telling the story of history's most turbulent and colourful lives' Dan Snow 'A hauntingly beautiful portrait of the Byron dynasty' Rebecca Rideal In the early eighteenth century, Newstead Abbey was among the most admired aristocratic homes in England. It was the abode of William, 4th Baron Byron - a popular amateur composer and artist - and his teenage wife Frances. But by the end of the century, the building had become a crumbling and ill-cared-for ruin. Surrounded by wreckage of his inheritance, the 4th Baron's dissipated son and heir William, 5th Baron Byron - known to history as the 'Wicked Lord' - lay on his deathbed alongside a handful of remaining servants and amidst a thriving population of crickets. This was the home that a small, pudgy boy of ten from Aberdeen - who the world would later come to know as Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, soldier, and adventurer - would inherit in 1798. His family, he would come to learn, had in recent decades become known for almost unfathomable levels of scandal and impropriety, from elopement, murder, and kidnapping to adultery, coercion, and thrilling near-death experiences at sea. Just as it had shocked the society of Georgian London, the outlandish and scandalous story of the Byrons - and the myths that began to rise around it - would his influence his life and poetry for posterity. The Fall of the House of Byron follows the fates of Lord Byron's ancestors over three generations in a drama that begins in rural Nottinghamshire and plays out in the gentlemen's clubs of Georgian London, amid tempests on far-flung seas, and in the glamour of pre-revolutionary France. A compelling story of a prominent and controversial characters, it is a sumptuous family portrait and an electrifying work of social history.

Emily Brand

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