WHEN A DUKE'S DAUGHTER FALLS FOR A GRUMPY EARL, ALL WAGERS ARE OFF. The Earl of Tempest told her to stay away from him. He was too old for her, his soul was too darkAnd Even though he was wrong and even though he was breaking her heart, Lady Lydia Cockfield respected his wishes and walked away.Until she stumbles on him a year later: lost and drunk, wagering his days away in London's Wicked Earl's Club. He isn't the hero she was seeking, but the moment she she meets his wounded gaze from across the room, an idea takes root. She will save him and hundreds of lost children at the same time. Because in saving the children, Lord Tempest can save himself. Light will flood his soul and heal his wounds. He can believe in goodness again-believe in himself.He can believe that love is possible.And if he can believe all that, then maybe, just maybe, he can open his heart to the one woman who will never give up on him and grasp the happiness he's deserved all along.

Wickedly sinful, the Earl of Sussex, is an unrepentant rake. The Wicked Earls' Club is the perfect place for a man of his station to indulge. That is until his parents force a match that threatens to rob him of his freedom. Unwilling to be tamed, he travels to meet his bride and demand she put a stop to this farce. Except Lady Tabitha is nothing he expected, and everything he never knew he wanted. Too bad this fiery wallflower is equally bent on ending their engagement. Lady Tabitha, daughter of a duke, will not be betrothed to a rake no matter what her father thinks of his social connections. As long as she doesn't stare into the depths of his green eyes, or linger on the strong lines of his jaw, she should be able to scheme her way out of this engagement. That is, if her intended groom would just cooperate with her plans. This is the first book in the Wicked Lords of London Series. My Duke's Seduction, My Duke's Deception, and My Earl's Entrapment are the next three books. Also coming are My Duke's Desire and The Earl of Dryden. #Historical #Romance #Victorian #Regency

* Secret Crush * Brother's Best Friend * CompromisedThree years ago, Lady Bethany Fitzwilliam's season in London was cut short when her father was killed in a duel. Shaken by the tragedy, she devotes herself to her grieving mother, sister, and brother and settles into a life of spinsterhood.Besides, no one can ever live up to "Chase" the Baron of Chaswick, who she's secretly loved for most of her life -and who also happens to be one of her brother's closest friends. Aside from being the most beautiful man she's ever known, Chase is charming, kind and all a woman could want. He'd never notice a girl like Bethany and so she'll suffer her unrequited love from afar. It ought to be enough.And it is.That is...until he has no choice but to notice her.

The debate over the true author of the Shakespeare canon has raged for centuries. Astonishingly little evidence supports the traditional belief that Will Shakespeare, the actor and businessman from Stratford-upon-Avon, was the author. Legendary figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman and Sigmund Freud have all expressed grave doubts that an uneducated man who apparently owned no books and never left England wrote plays and poems that consistently reflect a learned and well-traveled insider's perspective on royal courts and the ancient feudal nobility. Recent scholarship has turned to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford-an Elizabethan court playwright known to have written in secret and who had ample means, motive and opportunity to in fact have assumed the "Shakespeare" disguise. "Shakespeare" by Another Name is the literary biography of Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare." This groundbreaking book tells the story of de Vere's action-packed life-as Renaissance man, spendthrift, courtier, wit, student, scoundrel, patron, military adventurer, and, above all, prolific ghostwriter-finding in it the background material for all of The Bard's works. Biographer Mark Anderson incorporates a wealth of new evidence, including de Vere's personal copy of the Bible (in which de Vere underlines scores of passages that are also prominent Shakespearean biblical references).

This book challenges a longstanding and deeply ingrained belief in Shakespearean studies that The Tempest--long supposed to be Shakespeare's last play--was not written until 1611. In the course of investigating this proposition, which has not received the critical inquiry it deserves, a number of subsidiary and closely related interpretative puzzles come sharply into focus. These include the play's sources of New World imagery; its festival symbolism and structure; its relationship to William Strachey's True Reportory account of the 1609 Bermuda wreck of the Sea Venture (not published until 1625)--and the tangled history of how and why scholars have for so long misunderstood these matters. Publication of some preliminary elements of the authors' arguments in leading Shakespearean journals (starting in 2007) ignited a controversy that became part of the critical history. This book presents the case in full for the first time.

Shakespeare's largely misunderstood narrative poems contain within them an explosive commentary on the political storms convulsing his country The 1590s were bleak years for England. The queen was old, the succession unclear, and the treasury empty after decades of war. Amid the rising tension, William Shakespeare published a pair of poems dedicated to the young Earl of Southampton: Venus and Adonis in 1593 and The Rape of Lucrece a year later. Although wildly popular during Shakespeare's lifetime, to modern readers both works are almost impenetrable. But in her enthralling new book, the Shakespearean scholar Clare Asquith reveals their hidden contents: two politically charged allegories of Tudor tyranny that justified-and even urged-direct action against an unpopular regime. The poems were Shakespeare's bestselling works in his lifetime, evidence that they spoke clearly to England's wounded populace and disaffected nobility, and especially to their champion, the Earl of Essex. Shakespeare and the Resistance unearths Shakespeare's own analysis of a political and religious crisis which would shortly erupt in armed rebellion on the streets of London. Using the latest historical research, it resurrects the story of a bold bid for freedom of conscience and an end to corruption that was erased from history by the men who suppressed it. This compelling reading situates Shakespeare at the heart of the resistance movement.