Love and Marriage

Death of a Starlet

by Holly Tucker February 28, 2010

By Deborah Blum In the year of her death, starlet Olive Thomas, was a favorite of Hollywood gossip magazines. Married to Jack Pickford – younger brother of screen star Mary Pickford, she and her husband had a reputation for intense partying and intense quarreling, usually over his numerous side affairs – he’d developed syphilis as [...]

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The Dangers of a Mycenaean Childhood

by Holly Tucker February 6, 2010

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Fifteen-year-old Françoise meets her first husband

by Holly Tucker September 11, 2009

By Veronica Buckley From the humblest of births in a provincial prison cell, Françoise d’Aubigné made her perilous way out of desperate poverty to a brilliant salon life in Paris, and finally, as Madame de Maintenon, secret wife of the Sun King Louis XIV, to the centre of power at Versailles. In the winter of [...]

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Telling Time by Flowers

by Holly Tucker September 4, 2009

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By Mary Novik Recently, when I was reading from my novel Conceit, an experienced gardener asked whether the flower clock, used by Ann More to tell time, would actually work. In Conceit, it’s summer 1599, Ann is living in York House on the bank of the Thames in London, and she is having an erotic [...]

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East of the Sun

by Holly Tucker July 24, 2009

By Julia Clegson My research for East of the Sun began when I was five years old and met a remarkable woman called Mrs. Smith Pearse. She was in her sixties and had just returned from twenty years of living in India. Superficially, she was a classic Memsahib- the literal translation means wife of the [...]

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The Good Wife’s Guide

by Holly Tucker May 31, 2009

Macy Halford posted a great review of The Good Wife’s Guide on the New Yorker’s Book Bench website. Translated by Gina L. Greco and Christine M. Rose, The Good Wife’s Guide is a fourteenth-century instruction book for a young bride, written by her husband. It’s a primer on the fine art of male dominence. The [...]

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18th Century Domestic Violence

by Holly Tucker March 12, 2009

By Wendy Moore Wife-beating was both widely tolerated and sanctioned by law in 18th-century England. Yet the ordeal suffered by Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore, at the hands of her husband so shocked Georgian sensibilities that she not only won landmark legal battles but her husband was banished to prison. Marital violence is as [...]

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Book of the Week: Wedlock

by Holly Tucker March 9, 2009

By Holly Tucker This week’s Book of the Week is Wendy Moore’s WEDLOCK: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore. I have to concur with the praise it received in a recent UK review: “This splendid book, well researched and richly detailed, is as gripping [...]

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Book of the Week: City of God

by Holly Tucker January 12, 2009

Up this week: Beverly Swerling’s City of God: A Novel of Passion and Wonder in Old New York. Beverly’s novels are spell-binding journeys into an era rich in history and intrigue. For a flavor of her work, take a peek at her latest book trailer. (Yes, there are such things as book trailers now!) This [...]

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18th Century Marriage Customs

by Holly Tucker December 18, 2008

Guest post by Stephanie Cowell Mozart married at the age of twenty-five in Vienna’s Stephansdom Cathedral, where you can still go today and kneel near the spot where he knelt with his bride. He was a city man and sophisticated, so he may not have participated in some of these wedding customs…or perhaps he did. [...]

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