Sleeping Evie: Lady Goosebury’s Tales
This installment in Lady Goosebury’s Tales enfolds the reader in the lush aesthetic of the pre-Raphaelites: dream-steeped, detailed, wildly romantic, and swirling with dark underlayers of myth. Evie Henshawe, who lately lost her job in a dress shop, is starving and sleeping in an empty mausoleum in Highgate Cemetery when she attends an artist’s party in hopes of finding work. Hiding under a table eating sugared almonds, she meets the intensely beautiful and distracted Marquess of Ashcombe; Evie agrees to model for him, and hopes he wants more. But Ash, who’s often lost in his work and has built himself a castle evoking a highly romanticized Middle Ages, is loyal to his tenacious and hard-hearted fiancée, Perdita. Evie has to cross a great class divide and survive a vicious rival if she hopes to win him in the end.
Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rosetti make appearances in this world mixing the Gothic, the Romantic, and the Decadent, and the dangers of opium, poverty, and arsenic in the world of London art and industry, circa 1872, balance the passionate love story and fabulous prose with a texture many historical romances lack. Sleeping Evie is a delicious treat.
