My Favorite Books of 2023!!

    

I have chosen my favorite novels of 2023 mostly because the book stood out in an unusual way or the author or scholar shared research or new information I was previously unaware of.

1)   

 In the 1970s, a single night in a remote hunting lodge with a Hollywood director and his leading lady causes an international scandal that wrecks Astrid's glittering stage career and rips apart her marriage.

Her ex-husband, the charismatic Scottish actor Magnus Fellowes, finds global fame, while Astrid retreats to a Sussex windmill. Now 82, she lives there still, with a troupe of dachshunds and her loyal friend, Mrs Baker, who came to clean over twenty years ago, and never left. But Mrs Baker has a troubled past too - one that's caught up with them. There has been an 'Awful Incident' at the windmill; police are sniffing around. Then Astrid hears that Magnus, now on his death bed, is writing a tell-all memoir. Furious, she sets off for Scotland, determined to stop him, at all costs.

Windmill Hill is the story of two very different women with painful pasts and their unlikely friendship - deep, enduring and loyal to the last.

Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1529407923  ISBN 13: 9781529407921
Publisher: Quercus,

Lucy Atkins pulled at my heart strings during the emotional scenes between Astrid and her ex-husband.  I laughed out loud reading about these two women living in a windmill with a bunch of dachshunds running about which in itself is a picuture to behold!  I truly appreciated that Astrid and Mrs. Baker had each other for atleast twenty years and they did not have to deal with aging alone. During their twenty year friendship, whatever life threw at them they faced together and had each other for a support system. Sure there are secrets kept that if they come out all these years later, could get these old women in a lot of hot water. This just makes Windmill Hill all the more fun to read. 

Windmill Hill also deals with dual timelines concerning the previous owner of the windmill, during the 1920s, excerpts of handwritten love letters,etc. I don't want to ruin it for anyone.

2)    

Victorian England. A world of rural fairgrounds and glamorous London theatres. A world of dark secrets and deadly obsessions…

Twin sisters Keziah and Tilly Lovell are identical in every way, except that Tilly hasn’t grown a single inch since she was five. Coerced into promoting their father’s quack elixir as they tour the country fairgrounds, at the age of fifteen the girls are sold to a mysterious Italian known as ‘Captain’.

Theo is an orphan, raised by his grandfather, Lord Seabrook, a man who has a dark interest in anatomical freaks and other curiosities … particularly the human kind. Resenting his grandson for his mother’s death in childbirth, when Seabrook remarries and a new heir is produced, Theo is forced to leave home without a penny to his name.

Theo finds employment in Dr Summerwell’s Museum of Anatomy in London, and here he meets Captain and his theatrical ‘family’ of performers, freaks and outcasts.

But it is Theo’s fascination with Tilly and Keziah that will lead all of them into a web of deceits, exposing the darkest secrets and threatening everything they know… 

Source: Review copy
Publication: 22nd June 2023 from Orenda Books
PP: 300
ISBN-13: 978-1914585524

Many thanks to Orenda Books for my eArc!

'The evening nightingales are singing. 
The month of August lit with gold;

I still keep the rose you gave me,

I watch its red silk heart unfold.

The breath of rose, the sound of bird's song

Are ever tangled with romance.

Tis my pleasure to remember;

The day when you first came to me...'

The Fascination is filled with darkness and depravity at every turn where children like Theo and twin sisters Keziah and Tilly Lovell are at the hands of parents and grandparents who are supposed to care for them and guide them through life. Well, forget it. Throw all sense of sympathy, empathy and sensitivitiy out the window while you read this Victorian gothic kaliediscope of a novel. 

After reading and reviewing all of the author's works, Essie Fox has done it. I am finally speechless and in awe of what she has created. The Fascination is beautifully written about two different families, The Seabrook's and The Lovell's living their lives without any real love and care from anyone around them. If only their loved ones could accept them for their differences instead of profiting off of them, it would be a different novel.

The Fascination was a very emotional novel to read. Definitely, a page turner. I loved the atmosphere and descriptions of the gardens and walking outside and around Lord Seabrook's home. In the end, all I wanted to do was scoop up all the children and take care of them.  However, what made me smile was how Essie Fox used excerpts of Brothers Grimm, Snow-White and Red-Rose a beautiful fairy tale throughout chapters of the novel. I did not miss the description of a painting by Millais on the wall, mentions of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins' A Woman in White. 

3) 

Elizabeth Siddal is remembered as a Pre-Raphaelite supermodel and the muse and wife of Gabriel Rossetti. She is cast as a tragic heroine much like the Ophelia she modelled in the renowned Millais painting. But Elizabeth Siddal: Her Story overturns this myth. ‘Lizzie’ is presented as an aspirational and independent woman, artist and poet who knew what she wanted and was not afraid to let it be known.

With extraordinary stories, including previously undiscovered details of Siddal’s journeys across the UK and to the south of France, Jan Marsh reclaims Siddal’s narrative from the historical record. She brings new perspective to the post-natal, mental trauma Elizabeth suffered after a stillbirth. Furthermore, she casts new light on the renowned story of Siddal’s grave being exhumed for Rossetti’s poems.

Jan Marsh explores the finer, little known details of Siddal’s life, including her four months at art school in Sheffield, which Rossetti’s brother always denied. In addition to this, few will know how Siddal was often regarded as difficult and ungrateful.

A beautiful production, this illustrated book contains many of Siddal's own images which feature alongside Rossetti's at Tate Britain.

Historical record tends to forget or misremember women, but with Elizabeth Siddal: Her Story, Jan Marsh forces us to take a closer look and see a very different picture. Siddal was not passive and lacking in agency; she was a woman, artist and poet with a strong mind, flourishing career and an admirable talent.

Jan Marsh is a biographer and curator who pioneered the feminist understanding of women in the artistic circle around the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She followed this with individual life stories and scholarly studies that bring hitherto neglected women into the historical record, together with ground-breaking exhibitions, notably Pre-Raphaelite Sisters at the National Portrait Gallery in 2019-20. In Elizabeth Siddal: Her Story she presents a radical new account of the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite model and artist, who died tragically young.

Publisher:  Pallas Athene

Publication date: 6 April 2023

Hardback – 165 x 198 mm – 158 pages

101 colour and black-and-white images

Elizabeth Siddal by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

There was an English dinner here on Christmas Day, ending with plum-pudding, which was really very good indeed, and an honour to the country. I dined up in my room where I have dined for the last three weeks on account of bores. First class, one can get to the end of the world but one can never be alone or left at rest.  (Elizabeth Siddal writing her travel memories in a fit of boredom from Hotel des Princes, France, 1855).

Elizabeth Siddal Her Story is an illustrated look at the life of Elizabeth Siddal and those around her before and after meeting the men of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The paintings and drawing by herself and her husband, painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti are currently being shown in the Tate Britian exhibition, The Rossettis. 

"Lizzie" needed an upgrade shall we say; a much needed complete study of her life and Jan Marsh is just the woman to do it.  Her findings from researching the Siddall family to Elizabeth's first working jobs, to being discovered, to becoming a sitter, then a muse to finding love with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her illness, her weight, her looks. Was she just very independent in nature or was she doing her best to serve as inspiration for all these creative men!  It must have been hell.

Jan Marsh has debunked a very long standing myth, she has shared two letters Elizabeth Siddal wrote herself that give insight into Elizabeth's wonderful sense of humor. Jan Marsh writes about the relationship with John Ruskin, her trip to France, as well as what inspired Elizabeth Siddal to writer her poetry and paint her paintings. 

You will travel with The Rossettis (Gabriel and Lizzie) as they travel through England meeting some of his dearest artist friends and why Elizabeth did not meet all of her husband's immediate family.  Sharing artisitic experiences between the two I found to be very romantic, i.e. Rossetti's many poems about Lizzie but to get a glimpse into Elizabeth's poems and paintings while in love with Gabriel was just beautiful.

When it came to the sad end of Elizabeth's life, Jan Marsh uses  her paintings to support the well known surviving documentation surrounding her death, her burial, her funeral, etc. 

4)

  

‘Beggars can’t be choosers. They really can’t.’

Based on true historical events, Arresting Beauty follows the extraordinary story of Mary Ryan, who was found begging on Putney Heath at the age of ten by the celebrated Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Julia takes Mary into her magnificently bohemian household, to be trained as a maid and educated alongside her own sons, before becoming an assistant, muse and model for Julia in many of her pioneering photographs.

When Julia decides to move to Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, to live close to her great friend Alfred Tennyson, Mary—clever and rebellious—finds herself uncomfortably poised between two worlds—that of a servant girl in one, and in another, artistic assistant to Julia and befriending the likes of Tennyson, battling class and attitudes of the time to fulfil her own goals and perhaps even find love.

A sparkling historic romance novel based on a true-life story.

ISBN-13 : 9781913894160 (Hardback), 9781913894153 (Paperback), 9781913894177 (eBook)

Publication Date: September 30th 2023

RRP: £20.00 (Hardback), £10.99 (Paperback), £5.99 (eBook)

Thank you to Beachy Books for my digital review copy.

Julia Margaret Cameron, “Romeo and Juliet,” c. 1867, Harry Ransom Center, the University of Texas at Austin. 

Posed by sitters Mary Ryan and Henry Cotton

Henry took his leave of Julia and I said I would show him out. When we got to the front door I opened it for him (force of habit) but he suddenly seized my hand and pulled me outside into the dusk and along to the side of the house, away from where anyone could see us, and took me into his arms and began to kiss me, long kisses full of sweetness and tenderness and passion, with the scent of the first roses around us and the moon rising over the sea. He certainly had proved an apt pupil. When he finally left me, reluctantly and with many whispered farewells and murmurings of just-one-last-kiss, to walk across the fields back to his hotel, I stayed there in the darkness for a while, while my heart slowed back to normal. 

Fall into the world of artistic bohemia with photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron, her husband, her children including newest addition, orphaned, Mary Ryan. On Freshwater Bay, Isle of Wight, at Julia's home, Dimbola Lodge, we feel the hurried buzz of overfrenzied activity as author, Heather Cooper takes us through Mary Ryan's new life. We see her age over the years, with a naivete juxtaposed against her strong sense of self. She becomes a parlormaid rubbing shoulders with the immortal faces of Thomas Carlyle, Robert Browning and Julia's neighbor, Poet Laureate, Alfred Tennyson. 

Some of my most favorite chapters occurred between a curious young poetry reading Mary Ryan sneaking outdoors of Dimbola Lodge walking to Tennyson's nearby home, Farringford House. Some very sweet scenes of the laureate sitting under a tree talking to himself and as Mary gets closer, she hears a poem soon to be published, Maud!  Tennyson at Little Holland House equally surprised to see Mary Ryan there.   My favorite is the appearance of twelve year old Lionel Tennyson and Mary Ryan climbing up to the attic of Farringford House to see the stars while Tennyson was entertaining William Allingham.  

If you are curious about Mary Ryan's life with photographer, Julia Margaret Cameron and her clan, there are lots of wonderful chapters between the maids: Mary Hillier and Louisa as they get to know Mary Ryan. Heather Cooper very wisely describes the set up of photographs where Mary Ryan became the sitter and all of the home life situations that occur within the walls of Dimbola Lodge. 

This is a love story at heart, though. So, if you came for the romance its here in page turning beauty. From start to finish you will meet a few of MaryRyan's suitors before Henry Cotton sets his eyes on his true love. It is a tender love story told with a realism that could only come from orphaned beggar girl turned housemaid turned photographic sitter and assistant. 

The epilogue was a nice surprise as Heather Cooper provides more information on what happens to Mr. and Mrs. Henry Cotton after they marry leaving the Isle of Wight for India. Here's little hint as Mrs. Cotton becomes Lady Cotton with her children in this gorgeous painting included in Henry Cotton's memoir, India & Home Memories.

All the above books can be purcsed on Amazon dot com and Amazon dot co dot uk