So excited to be sharing the first book from Bea Koch, whom you may know as one of the owners of The Ripped Bodice, one of the best bookstores ever.
Mad & Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency Bea Koch (September 1, 2020) Regency England is a world immortalized by Jane Austen and Lord Byron in their beloved novels and poems. The popular image of the Regency continues to be mythologized by the many romance novels set in the period, which focus almost exclusively on wealthy, white, Christian members of the upper classes. But there are hundreds of fascinating women who don’t fit history books limited perception of what was historically accurate for early 19th century England.
Bea discusses women like Mary Seacole – a Jamaican Scottish woman who helped nurse the injured during the Crimean War in the 19th century; Dido Elizabeth Belle – whose mother was enslaved but she was raised by her white father’s family in England; Caroline Herschel – who acted as her brother’s assistant as he hunted the heavens for comets, and ended up discovering eight on her own; Anne Lister, who lived on her own terms with her common-law wife at Shibden Hall, and Judith Montefiore, a Jewish woman who wrote the first English language Kosher cookbook.
As one of the owners of the successful romance-only bookstore The Ripped Bodice, Bea Koch has had a front row seat to controversies surrounding what is accepted as “historically accurate” for the wildly popular Regency period. Following in the popular footsteps of books like Ann Shen’s Bad Girls Throughout History, Koch takes the Regency, one of the most loved and idealized historical time periods and a huge inspiration for American pop culture, and reveals the independent-minded, standard-breaking real historical women who lived life at their own pace. In Mad & Bad, we look beyond popular perception of the Regency into the even more vibrant, diverse, and fascinating historical truth.
THE TASK: We have three copies to give away, and as usual, I’ll be picking the winner at random. To enter, please comment and share your favorite Historical Woman. (Of any time period!)
THE RULES: All entries must be posted in the comments of this post by 9 p.m. Pacific time on Sunday. FYI, if this is the first time you’ve commented here, the system will automatically kick you into comment moderation, but don’t worry, I will rescue you. (Open to US readers only; all prizing courtesy of the publisher.)
