Perdita

Love won’t let her go. Marged Brice is 134 years old. She’d be ready to go, if it weren’t for Perdita... The Georgian Bay lighthouse’s single eye keeps watch over storm and calm, and Marged grew up in its shadow, learning the language of the wind and the trees. There’s blustery beauty there, where sea and sky incite each other to mischief…or worse… Garth Hellyer of the Longevity Project doesn’t believe Marged was a girl coming of age in the 1890s, but reading her diaries in the same wild and unpredictable location where she wrote them might be enough to cast doubt on his common sense. Everyone knows about death. It’s life that’s much more mysterious.

Few women's lives have described such an arc as that of Mary Robinson. She began her career as an actress, became a royal mistress and blackmailer, and ended it just two decades later as a Romantic poet. This biography explores Georgian England during a period of extreme political, social and cultural upheaval through the life of this woman.

As featured on Bustle.com, Best of Summer Round-up Sure, Arielle won't deny that she has a vivid, even wild, imagination. Sure, it sometimes runs away with her. And yes, it's true that she never recovered from the drowning death of her older brother, Justin, ten years ago, when Arielle was a little child. She almost hopes that ghosts are real, so that she might see Justin again. But ever since the misty morning when Arielle stumbles on the macabre sight of the body of her sister Casey's best friend, Perdita, being lifted from a nearby pond, ghostly images begin to appear to Arielle. Can they be Perdita, reaching out as speculation about her death ramps up from suicide to foul play? Perdita's younger brother, Tex, is back from private school, and Arielle can't get him off her mind, although he's a beautiful boy with scary secrets. Worse yet, there's no one to tell: big sister Casey's off to college, and Arielle discovers her own sister's cache of secret writings, along with a bizarre note from Perdita. What's real? What's fantasy? In a compelling tale that hurtles toward a stunning conclusion, the imprint of grief and the boundaries of human imagination are stretched to their limits.

Bad girl Perdita Durango and her dealer boyfriend Romeo Dolorosa get their kicks on a journey from Louisiana to Los Angeles that involves santeria rituals and kidnapping.

Mary Robinson, nicknamed 'Perdita' by the Prince of Wales after her role on the London stage, was a woman in whom showmanship and reckless behaviour contrasted with romantic sensibility and radical thinking. Born in Bristol in 1758, she moved to London with her family at a young age and was trained by Garrick for the theatre. After a royal command performance as Perdita in "The Winter's Tale", she was hotly pursued by George, the 17-year-old Prince of Wales, and she became his first mistress. He gave her GBP 20,000, a house in Berkeley Square, and another in Old Windsor; the popular press followed the affair with glee and gusto. But when he left her she blackmailed him for the return of his letters. A string of other high-profile lovers followed including Lord Malden, Charles James Fox and, most notably, Lt Col Tarlton. However, a miscarriage left Mary semi-paralysed and when her last lover deserted her to marry someone else, she wrote two novels in revenge. Her growing literary reputation brought in many friends, including Coleridge but her death saw the bailiffs trying to evict her from her cottage. This lively account of one of the most extraordinary women of her age is set against the social, literary, political and military background of the times.

In 1889 uniformed post-boys were discovered moonlighting in a West End brothel frequented by men of the upper classes. "The Cleveland Street Scandal" erupted and Victorian Britain faced the possibility that the Post Office-a bureaucratic backbone of nation and empire-was inspiring and servicing subversive sexual behavior. However, the unlikely alliance between sex and the postal service was not exactly the news the sensational press made it out to be. Postal Pleasures explores the relationship between illicit sex and the Royal Mail from reforms initiated in 1840 up to the imperial end of the nineteenth century. With a combination of historical details and literary analyses, Kate Thomas illustrates how the postal network, its uniformed employees, and its material trappings-envelopes, postmarks, stamps-were used to signal and circulate sexual intrigue. For many, the idea of an envelope promiscuously jostling its neighbors in a post boy's bag, or the notion that secrets passed through the eyes and fingers of telegraph girls, was more stimulating than the actual contents of correspondence. Writers like Anthony Trollope, Eliza Lynn Lynton, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and others, invoked the postal system as both an instrument and a metaphor for sexual relations that crossed and double-crossed lines of class, marriage, and heterosexuality. Postal Pleasures adds a new dimension to studies of the era as it uncovers the unlikely linkage between the Victorian Post Office and the queer networks it inspired.