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SCANDALOUS: LADIES WITH LESS-THAN-PERFECT REPUTATIONS
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by Megan E. Abbott
Apply a sly feminist sensibility to postwar Hollywood noir, and you get a sordid saga in which women normally consigned to one-note victimhood turn out to be alarmingly complicit in their own downfalls. A fictionalized account based of the mysterious 1949 disappearance of actress Jean Spangler.
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by Melanie Benjamin
Anne Morrow, self-effacing daughter of a suffragette and an ambassador, is surprised when Charles, already a celebrity thanks to his first trans-Atlantic flight in 1927, asks her -- instead of her blonde, outgoing older sister Elisabeth -- to go flying with him. And it is Anne whom Charles will marry.
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by Amy Bloom
Lorena Hickok meets Eleanor Roosevelt in 1932 while reporting on Franklin Roosevelt's first presidential campaign. Having grown up worse than poor in South Dakota and reinvented herself as the most prominent woman reporter in America, "Hick," as she's known to her friends and admirers, is not quite instantly charmed by the idealistic, patrician Eleanor.
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by Paulo Coelho
When Mata Hari arrived in Paris she was penniless. Within months she was the most celebrated woman in the city. As a dancer, she shocked and delighted audiences; as a courtesan, she bewitched the era's richest and most powerful men. But as paranoia consumed a country at war, Mata Hari's lifestyle brought her under suspicion.
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by Lynn Cullen
Renaissance portraitist Sofonisba Anguissola joins the Spanish court of Felipe II after a scandal in her native Italy and becomes embroiled in a love triangle involving the royal couple and the king's illegitimate half-brother, Don Juan.
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by Emma Donoghue
Donoghue takes scraps of the intriguing true story of Mary Saunders, a servant girl who murdered her mistress in 1763, and fashions from them an intelligent and mesmerizing historical novel. Born to a mother who sews for pennies and a father who died in jail, 14-year-old Mary has a hard life, but an eye for fine things and ambitions beyond her social station. Her desire for a shiny red ribbon leads her to sell the only thing she owns: her body.
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by Stella Duffy
Daughter of an actress and a bear keeper for the Hippodrome of Constantinople, Theodora was trained as a dancer, singer, and actress who performed on the stage and in the bedrooms of anyone who could afford her, from the time she was a child. Her skills as a comedic orator endeared her to both rich and poor, noble and common, so much so that she was exhausted by the time she was 16 years old.
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by Ellen Feldman
The daughter of a hard-drinking, smooth-tongued free thinker and a mother worn down by thirteen children, Margaret Sanger vowed her life would be different. Trained as a nurse, she fought for social justice beside labor organizers, anarchists, socialists, and other progressives, eventually channeling her energy to one singular cause: legalizing contraception.
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by Therese Fowler
The 1875 marriage of Alva Smith and William Vanderbilt is one of convenience. Alva needs a rich husband to save her family from poverty after her father's losses in Confederate investments, and the nouvea riche Vanderbilts hope the Smith lineage of generations of prominent Americans and European royals will help them join the top ranks of New York society.
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by Jim Fergus
fA ictional account of the controversial "Brides for Indians" program, a clandestine U.S. government-sponsored program (and never actually approved) intended to instruct "savages" in the ways of civilization and to assimilate the Indians into white culture through the offspring of these unions.
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by Maureen Gibbon
Paris, 1862. A young girl in a threadbare dress and green boots, hungry for experience, meets the mysterious and wealthy artist Edouard Manet. The encounter will change her -- and the art world -- forever.
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by Karen Harper
Reimagines the life of American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt as the reluctant and bullied bride of the Duke of Marlborough before she finds the inner strength to fight for women's equality.
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by Sherry Jones
From servitude and poverty in America, Josephine Baker rose to fame as a showgirl in her famous banana skirt. Along the way she was a Civil Rights activist -- and a member of the French Resistance during WWII.
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by Mary Beth Keane
A story inspired by the life of the woman known as "Typhoid Mary" traces the efforts of a headstrong Irish immigrant whose tenacity and talent for cooking gains her entry into upper-class kitchens until the discovery of her status as a disease carrier forces her into an isolation that she eventually defies with horrific results.
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by Anna Mazzola
In 1837, a woman's dismembered body is found scattered across London. Sarah Gale, a seamstress and fallen woman, is sentenced to hang for her alleged role in the murder; although she professes her innocence, she is hiding darkness in her past.
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by Paula McLain
Martha Gellhorn is considered one of the most important war correspondents of the 20th century. But when she meets Hemingway in late 1936 in a Key West bar at the beginning of this novel, she's in her late 20s and has just published her first book. Ernest is 10 years older and still married to second wife Pauline. Having been burned by an affair with a married man, Martha insists that her deepening friendship with Ernest is purely platonic.
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by Kate Pullinger
When her mistress departs from Victorian London society to seek relief from tuberculosis symptoms in Egypt, maid Sally throws herself into their new culture and comes to know freedoms she has never experienced before she is harshly reminded of her humble station in life.
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by Stephanie Thornton
Alice may be the president's daughter, but she's nobody's darling. As bold as her signature color Alice Blue, the gum-chewing, cigarette-smoking, poker-playing First Daughter discovers that the only way for a woman to stand out in Washington is to make waves -- oceans of them.
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by Dawn Clifton Tripp
A tale inspired by the romance between master painter Georgia O'Keeffe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz describes how a young O'Keeffe becomes the married photographer's mistress and muse as her star rises in the art world in spite of criticism about her role as the subject of Stieglitz's infamous nudes.
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by Beatriz Williams
As the freedom of the Jazz Age transforms New York City, the iridescent Mrs. Theresa Marshall of Fifth Avenue and Southampton, Long Island, has done the unthinkable: she's fallen in love with her young paramour, Captain Octavian Rofrano, a handsome aviator and hero of the Great War.
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