Well Dressed Lies
Vicky and Tennie are as engaging a pair of scoundrels as you are likely to encounter in literature. They don’t mean to be, but sometimes there are no other choices. It’s 1877, and Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennessee Claflin have come to London because William Vanderbilt, the son of Tennessee’s deceased lover Cornelius Vanderbilt, has paid them to do so to get them out of New York. It’s a chance for a new start, away from the scandal and notoriety that already surround them in the States, from Victoria’s run for President to the sisters’ revelation of the adulterous affairs of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, and their subsequent jailing on obscenity charges.
Throw in the ghost of Paschal Beverly Randolph, American founder of the Rosicrucians, New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennet, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the actress Lillie Langtry, and Henry James, who may or may not have used Vicky as his model for Mrs. Headway in The Siege of London, along with a fictitious and promiscuous duchess, and you have a cast of brilliant, erratic Victorians whose doings will convince you that the Victorians were a lot more fun than we think. First-person narration alternates between Vicky, Tennie, and Henry James, a not completely passive observer.
Vicky and Tennie try to be good, they really do, but the temptation to make some money doing spiritualist readings, their former association with the Free Love movement, inconvenient ex-lovers, and Tennie’s actual psychic abilities, make it hard. And when they both fall in love, all hell breaks loose. Well Dressed Lies is an excellent stand-alone novel but continues the sisters’ adventures from the earlier novel The Naked Truth.
