Congratulations to
Claire Dressman, winner of last week's Friday Freebie:
Alice Bliss by Laura Harrington.
This week's book giveaway is another two-fer deal. This week, one lucky reader has the chance to win a copy of both
Half In Shade: Family, Photography, and Fate by Judith Kitchen and
Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady by Kate Summerscale. Both non-fiction books center around the value of family, focusing on lives in the two centuries we've just left in our rearview mirror. Both books come highly recommended by yours truly. Here are the plot summaries from the publishers (Coffee House Press and Bloomsbury):
When Judith Kitchen discovered boxes of family photos in her mother's closet,
it sparked curiosity and speculation. Piecing together her memories with the
physical evidence in the photos, Kitchen explores the gray areas between the
present and the past, family and self, certainty and uncertainty. The result is
a lyrical, ennobling anatomy of a heritage, family, mother-daughter
relationships, and the recovery from an illness that captures with precision the
forces of the heart and mind when “none of us knows what lies beyond the moment,
outside the frame.” Stuart Dybek praised
Half in Shade by saying, “Judith Kitchen has written a book that is at once clear and accessible and at
the same time insistently complex. Her effortlessly constructed hybrids make
Half in Shade part memoir, part speculation, part essay, a demonstration
of the interactive art of seeing, and finally for me, a beautifully sustained
meditation. It is at that meditative level that the book’s potent, unsentimental
emotive power gathers.”
Headstrong, high-spirited, and already widowed, Isabella Walker became Mrs.
Henry Robinson at age 31 in 1844. Her first husband had died suddenly, leaving
his estate to a son from a previous marriage, so she inherited nothing. A
successful civil engineer, Henry moved them, by then with two sons, to
Edinburgh’s elegant society in 1850. But Henry traveled often and was cold and
remote when home, leaving Isabella to her fantasies. No doubt thousands of Victorian women faced the same circumstances, but
Isabella chose to record her innermost thoughts—and especially her infatuation
with a married Dr. Edward Lane—in her diary. Over five years the entries
mounted—passionate, sensual, suggestive. One fateful day in 1858 Henry chanced
on the diary and, broaching its privacy, read Isabella's intimate entries. Aghast at his wife’s perceived infidelity, Henry petitioned for divorce on the
grounds of adultery. Until that year, divorce had been illegal in England, the
marital bond being a cornerstone of English life. Their trial would be a cause
celebre, threatening the foundations of Victorian society with the specter of “a
new and disturbing figure: a middle class wife who was restless, unhappy, avid
for arousal.” Her diary, read in court, was as explosive as Flaubert’s
Madame
Bovary, just published in France but considered too scandalous to be translated
into English until the 1880s. As she accomplished in her award-winning and bestselling
The Suspicions of
Mr. Whicher, Kate Summerscale brilliantly recreates the Victorian world,
chronicling in exquisite and compelling detail the life of Isabella Robinson,
wherein the longings of a frustrated wife collided with a society clinging to
rigid ideas about sanity, the boundaries of privacy, the institution of
marriage, and female sexuality.
If you'd like a chance at winning a copy of both books, simply email your name and mailing address to
thequiveringpen@gmail.com
Put FRIDAY
FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. One entry per person, please. Despite
its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries
until midnight on June 21--at which time I'll draw the winning name. I'll
announce the lucky reader on June 22. If you'd like to join the mailing list
for the once-a-week
Quivering Pen newsletter, simply add the
words "Sign me up for the newsletter" in the body of your email. Your email
address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third
party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address
for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).
Want to
double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by
posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting
it on Twitter. Once you've done either or both of those, send me an additional
e-mail saying "I've shared" and I'll put your name in the hat twice.
No comments:
Post a Comment