shereads
If you like this…read THIS By Katie VanBrackle | katie@northsidewoman.com
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“Downton Abbey,” the British period drama television series that follows the lives of the wealthy Crawley family and their servants.
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Music by 18th century Austrian composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, whose operas, concertos, symphonies and sonatas profoundly shaped classical music.
Read this... Mozart’s Last Aria
By Matt Rees The news arrives in a letter to his sister, Nannerl, in December 1791. But the message carries more than word of Nannerl’s brother’s demise. Two months earlier, Mozart confided to his wife that his life was rapidly drawing to a close…and that he knew he had been poisoned. In Vienna to pay final respects, Nannerl soon finds herself ensnared in a web of suspicion and intrigue – as the actions of jealous lovers, sinister creditors, rival composers and Mozart’s Masonic brothers suggest that dark secrets hastened the genius to his grave. As Nannerl digs deeper into the mystery surrounding her brother’s passing, Mozart’s black fate threatens to overtake her as well. Transporting readers to the salons and concert halls of 18th-century Austria, “Mozart’s Last Aria” is a magnificent historical mystery that pulls back the curtain on a world of soaring music, burning passion and powerful secrets.
Read this... Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey: The Lost Legacy of Highclere Castle
By the Countess of Carnarvon This is the story behind Highclere Castle, the real-life inspiration and setting for Julian Fellowes’ Emmy Award-winning show “Downton Abbey,” and the life of one of its most famous inhabitants, Lady Almina, the fifth Countess of Carnarvon. Drawing on a rich store of materials from the archives of Highclere Castle, including diaries, letters and photographs, the current Lady Carnarvon has written a transporting story of this fabled home on the brink of war. Much like her Masterpiece Classic counterpart Lady Cora Crawley, Lady Almina was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, Alfred de Rothschild, who married his daughter off at an early age, her dowry serving as the crucial link in the effort to preserve the Earl of Carnarvon’s ancestral home. Throwing open the doors of Highclere Castle to tend the wounded of World War I, Lady Almina distinguished herself as a brave and remarkable woman. This rich tale contrasts the splendor of Edwardian life in a great house against the backdrop of the First World War and offers an inspiring and revealing picture of the woman at the center of the history of Highclere Castle.
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Poetry by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, one of the most prominent poets of the Victorian era, married to equally talented poet and playwright Robert Browning. “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.” – Sonnets from the Portuguese
Read this... Lady’s Maid: A Novel
By Margaret Forster Lily Wilson became more than lady’s maid to the fragile, housebound Elizabeth Barrett. Her mistress’s gaiety and sharp intelligence, the power of her poetry and her deep emotional need drew Wilson into a strange intimacy that
16 | northsidewoman.com | september2013
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“Girl with a Pearl Earring,” the captivating work by 17th century Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, now on display at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art through Sept. 29.
Read this... The Girl with the Pearl Earring
By Tracy Chevalier Vermeer’s “Girl with a Pearl Earring” has been called the Dutch Mona Lisa. Sometimes she appears to be smiling sensuously, while other times she seems unbearably sad. Author Tracy Chevalier says, “I have always loved Vermeer’s paintings. There is so much mystery in each painting, in the women he depicts, so many stories suggested but not told. I wanted to tell one of them.” In Chevalier’s work of fiction, 16-year-old Griet goes to work as a maid in the home of Delft’s most renowned painter, where she is expected to know her place. But in the Vermeer household, dominated by his mercurial wife and her formidable mother, Griet soon catches the eye of the master. Captivated by Griet’s quiet manner, intuitive spirit, and fascination with art, Vermeer begins to draw her into his world, a rarefied place of exotic color and dazzling light, shifting shadows and unimaginable beauty. Their growing intimacy spreads tension and deception in the ordered household and even, as the scandal seeps out, ripples into the town beyond. With its striking sense of period detail – vividly evoking a distant place and time – “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” tells the tale of a young girl on the brink of womanhood, whose life is transformed by her brief encounter with genius…even as she herself is immortalized on canvas.
would last 16 years. It was Wilson who smuggled Miss Barrett out of the gloomy Wimpole Street house, witnessed her secret wedding to Robert Browning in an empty church and fled with them to threadbare lodgings and the heat, light and colors of Italy. As housekeeper, nursemaid, companion and confidante, she was with Elizabeth in every crisis – birth, bereavement, travel, literary triumph. And when Wilson’s own affairs took a dramatic turn, she came to expect the loyalty from Elizabeth that she herself had always given. Artfully weaving fact and fiction, Margaret Forster has uncannily captured the tone and passion of a classic Victorian novel – the intricate nuances of relationship, the social limitations of servitude and womanhood and the poignant bloom of affections injured and reborn. ■