'The Coward Does It With A Kiss' is out!

Well today (7th April) marks 121 years since Constance Wilde's death, at the early age of forty, from what is now believed to have been Multiple Sclerosis. Several authors have given her a voice over the years, including fellow Goodreads Author Lexi Wolfe in Women Of Forgotten Importance: Three Stories and of course Franny Moyle with her 2011 biography Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde; and now my own contribution, The Coward Does it with a Kiss has been updated and is available in both paperback and Kindle on Amazon! Here's the blurb to whet your appetites:

"It has often been said (how often!) that I could not be blamed for having misunderstood you, that your actions were and are beyond the comprehension of decent people. But I do understand you, Oscar; I understand you perfectly well. It is myself, myself I do not understand."
'Following Oscar Wilde's imprisonment for gross indecency in 1895, his wife Constance seeks refuge on the Continent with their two young sons. She and her husband are never to meet again. Reading through the diaries in which she recorded her thoughts, feelings and reactions throughout their marriage, she writes an extended letter to Oscar in which she tries to make sense of their shared past, examines the truths and deceptions of their relationship, and searches desperately for a handle onto her own identity. Drawing on the recorded facts of the Wildes' marriage and their final years of separate self-imposed exile, this is the memoir Constance Wilde might have written, a moving testimony to a love that was inevitably doomed.'

As I explain in the Preface, much has been discovered about Constance since The Coward was first published back in 1990, and I've tried to be wisely selective in incorporating new material into the narrative as I didn't want to clog the flow of her retrospection with new facts and dates unnecessarily, especially if they would have had no major impact upon her thoughts and feelings during her final months. I do hope that anyone who's read the original version will find that The Coward Does it with a Kiss still offers a plausible picture of what Constance Wilde might have been thinking, feeling and wanting to say during the last three months of her life!