Manners, Masks and Morals

Lillie Langtry

The most original and penetrating book on Mrs. Langtry that has been written... fresh and revealing.

Beatty writes with wit and gusto--The tone of her book - racy, sharp-witted and elegantly aphoristic - is nicely appropriate to its subject matter.

LAURA BEATTY lives in the middle of Salcey, one of the very few remaining medieval hunting forests in England. The forest, she says, has provided us with food, forage, fuel, materials for building and transport - yet it is also the place where we keep our bogeys, where witches live, and where characters go in 'and come out wiser or sadder or dead or different'. 
 
Laura Beatty is married with three children.She is the author of a biography of Lillie Langtry.

Mrs Langtry - born a provincial in 1853, died rich and lonely in 1929 - was surrounded by scandal, luxary and gossip; but this new book goes beyond these outward trappings to lift the masks that Oscar Wilde, her friend and mentor, taught her to wear. It is not so much a life as a series of lives - each one distinct from the next - as Lillie reinvented herself. At its centre are the love letters written by Lillie to Arthur Jones, her childhood friend and secret lover, at the time of her fall from Society, her near-bankruptcy, and the birth of her illegitimate daughter at a hidden address in Paris. Laura Beatty captures exactly the spirit of the age, and reveals a passionate woman for whom the charge of opportunism was by no means the whole story.

Laura Beatty

A novel of masterly understatement... Laura Beatty uses [landscape] with subtle obliquity as a grid for mapping the emotional lives of her twin heroines, women divided by nearly four centuries.

From the virtuoso opening chapter, Beatty takes an offbeat, impressionistic approach... She is interested in the darkness of history, belief and the motivations of the heart: in how "places make people". Beatty's prose swoops and soars; she is particularly good on animals and birds, but can also turn her nature writer's intense gaze on the behaviour of humans.

The lives of two women, centuries apart are curiously entwined. Beatty makes you feel the layers of history existing alongside the present, so that the stories blend seamlessly... Beautifully written...

Binding together the lives of two different yet strangely similar women, Beatty weaves a ruminative and richly rewarding narrative

A well-researched novel, bringing exciting historical events into an engaging and easily absorbed format. By merit of her excellent writing, Beatty has avoided the usual pitfalls of historical novels by giving it a modern twist, moving effortlessly between the past and present. I glimpsed what life might have been like in England nearly four hundred years ago... Prepare to be reeled in hook, line and sinker with Darkling – it won’t disappoint!

The seamless transitions between historical source and fictional narrative are gratifying

Mia Morgan, in the middle of her life, is a woman under siege: by memories of her late lover, by the relationship with her blind father, and by a family secret she can’t forget. She is also accused of living in the past: her days are spent amid the life and letters of Lady Brilliana Harley, who lived nearly four hundred years ago during the English Civil War. 
 
Brilliana Harley is a Puritan, a lone Roundhead in a county of Royalists, and it is not long before her enemies sit down in siege around her. As cannon-shot rains down upon her castle, she alone must captain a garrison of men and defend her home. 
 
Out of Brilliana’s words emerges a woman of courage and conviction, a loving mother and capable wife, dutiful even under duress. As Mia pieces her together, she finds that it is through Brilliana’s life, so different and yet so similar, that she can come to understand her own. 
 
Darkling is a revolutionary undertaking: an echoing of two lives across the centuries, deftly weaving original seventeenth-century documents into the fabric of a modern fiction. The result is a book of voices, past and present, exquisitely observed and skilfully summoned.

Laura Beatty

Praise for Darkling

A novel of masterly understatement... Laura Beatty uses [landscape] with subtle obliquity as a grid for mapping the emotional lives of her twin heroines, women divided by nearly four centuries.

From the virtuoso opening chapter, Beatty takes an offbeat, impressionistic approach... She is interested in the darkness of history, belief and the motivations of the heart: in how "places make people". B ...

The lives of two women, centuries apart are curiously entwined. Beatty makes you feel the layers of history existing alongside the present, so that the stories blend seamlessly... Beautifully writte ...

A novel of masterly understatement... Laura Beatty uses [landscape] with subtle obliquity as a grid for mapping the emotional lives of her twin heroines, women divided by nearly four centuries.

From the virtuoso opening chapter, Beatty takes an offbeat, impressionistic approach... She is interested in the darkness of history, belief and the motivations of the heart: in how "places make people". B ...

The lives of two women, centuries apart are curiously entwined. Beatty makes you feel the layers of history existing alongside the present, so that the stories blend seamlessly... Beautifully writte ...

A novel of masterly understatement... Laura Beatty uses [landscape] with subtle obliquity as a grid for mapping the emotional lives of her twin heroines, women divided by nearly four centuries.

From the virtuoso opening chapter, Beatty takes an offbeat, impressionistic approach... She is interested in the darkness of history, belief and the motivations of the heart: in how "places make people". B ...

The lives of two women, centuries apart are curiously entwined. Beatty makes you feel the layers of history existing alongside the present, so that the stories blend seamlessly... Beautifully writte ...

Books by Laura Beatty

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