Julia Herdman's Blog: Julia Herdman Books, page 9
July 27, 2017
Darcy’s Letter to Elizabeth
This letter is the watershed moment in Pride and Prejudice. From this moment on Elizabeth Bennet knows she has misread Darcy. Oh, how her heart must have ached after reading it. It is an extra-ordinarily long letter for a novel these days. I wonder which of us who write would dare to put a letter […]
July 26, 2017
Cristallo
We take glass for granted today but this fragile material was once so prized men were condemned to death for revealing its secrets. Without there would be no chandeliers and no sparkles to wear. The Venetians had been making glass since Roman times but by the late 1200s, the production of glass objects of the […]
July 25, 2017
Dancing through the bedrooms of Europe
Klemens Wenzel Nepomuk Lothar, Fürst von Metternich-Winneburg zu Beilstein otherwise known simply as Metternich was probably the greatest diplomat of the nineteenth century. As well as being a towering intellectual he seems to have been a very physical man, if not on the field of battle then in the bedchamber. In her book, Dorothea Lieven: […]
July 24, 2017
I want to sleep with common people
This story is about an Empress with a taste for the common man. Just like the Greek girl in the Pulp classic, ‘She wanted to sleep with the common people’. Elizabeth Petrovna was born at Kolomenskoye, near Moscow, on 18 December 1709. She was the daughter of Peter the Great, Tsar of Russia, by his […]
July 21, 2017
Free Preview – Sinclair
Chapter 1 – Lies and Ambition ‘Gravesend, 1 January 1786’ It was dark when James Sinclair left the Anchor Inn and headed for the docks. As he walked across the cobbles towards the ‘Sherwell’, the bitter easterly wind flecked his coat with icy grains of snow. Moonlight broke intermittently through the clouds, illuminating the mighty […]
The Dundas Family – Money and Politics
Bankers and men of property are some of the richest men on the planet today. Their relationship with governments and the democratic process is a battle for power. Locked in a war of attrition; the bankers’ desire is to operate unfettered while governments’ desire income and responsibility through regulation. Often richer than countries and certainly […]
July 20, 2017
The History of the Love Letter
There would be no love letters without pens, ink and that luscious bright-red blob of sealing wax for the heroine of the story to crack open at her dressing table. A good goose quill was the letter writer’s standard kit until the invention of the metal dip nib pen in the 1820s. These quills glided […]
July 19, 2017
Harsh Justice
The Poldarks are having their usual brush with the law this season. This time it’s the life of Drake Carne, Demelza‘s brother whose life hangs in the balance. Justice in the 18th century was probably as rare as hen’s teeth for the common man. 18th-century law enforcement was very different from modern-day policing. The prosecution […]
July 18, 2017
Imperial Crushes
Archduchess Maria Christina was born on her mother’s 25th birthday at the Imperial Palace in Vienna, she was her fifth child and fourth daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria and Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor. Maria Christina Johanna Josepha Antonia was born on 13 May 1742 at Vienna, Austria. The next day she was baptised […]
July 17, 2017
Witch or Saint ? Maria Gaetana Agnesi
Maria Gaetana Agnesi 16 May 1718 – 9 January 1799 was an Italian mathematician, philosopher, theologian and humanitarian. She was born in Milan, to a wealthy and literate family the third of 21 children. Her father Pietro Agnesi, a University of Bologna mathematics professor, her mother was the daughter of a prosperous silk manufacturer. Maria’s father […]
