Mailbox Monday 12.05.11

Hosted this month by Let Them Read Books.

Mailbox Monday is the gathering place for readers to share the books that came into their house last week (checked out library books don’t count, eBooks & audio books do). Warning: Mailbox Monday can lead to envy, toppling TBR piles and humongous wish lists.

While Rowena Cherwood did not go around boasting of it, she had a tidy legacy from her parents. Free to choose the life she wanted, and unwilling to live with her overbearing aunt, she accepted a position as Lady Bradwell’s companion.

A spinster of twenty-seven, Rowena gave little thought to marriage — until Lyn Bradwell, Lady Bradwell’s long absent son, returned to England. Their chemistry was immediate — and fiery.

Love was the last thing on Rowena’s mind — or Lyn’s. Lady Bradwell, impatient for her companion’s happiness and her son’s, wondered how long it would be before her companion and her son would open their eyes.

ebook won from LibraryThing.

In the turbulent years of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, three poets—Byron, Shelley, and Keats—come to prominence, famous and infamous, for their vivid personalities, and their glamorous, shocking, and sometimes tragic lives. In this electrifying novel, those lives are explored through the eyes of the women who knew and loved them—intensely, scandalously.

Four women from widely different backgrounds are linked by a sensational fate. Mary Shelley: the gifted daughter of gifted parents, for whom passion leads to exile, loss, and a unique fame. Lady Caroline Lamb: born to fabulous wealth and aristocratic position, who risks everything for the ultimate love affair. Fanny Brawne: her quiet, middle-class girlhood is transformed—and immortalized—by a disturbing encounter with genius. Augusta Leigh: the unassuming poor relation who finds herself flouting the greatest of all taboos.

With the originality, richness, and daring of the poets themselves, Passion presents the Romantic generation in a new and unforgettable light.

Early Christmas present from a friend.