Rachel Knowles's Blog

We're launching a new version of this website in the spring of 2024.

That's why we've not added much new material this year.

Watch out for new site coming soon.

It will include much of the content from this site - and more besides!

 

He must wed to keep his dreamalive—her dream will die if he doesn’t choose her

LordBeaumont has only one love in his life—horses. Constantly upbraided by hisoverbearing mother, Beau’s desperate to break free from her control and provehimself by breeding a winning racehorse.

ElizaMerry has secretly loved the reckless Viscount ever since she was a girl.Forced to restrain her unruly behaviour to attend the London season, the timid,tongue-tied lady she becomes is nothing like the lively g...

 

A heartbroken widower. A downtrodden companion. 

Their instant attraction offers hope for the future—if their secrets don’t destroy them first.

Estate manager Peter Crowley has abandoned hope of ever loving again. No woman has touched his heart since the death of his wife.

Now his life is centred on the beloved daughter he’s been forced to send away to school.

Meg Harding knows nothing of love. The sole companion of a cantankerous old lady, she smiles in the face of adversity, but dreams of a ...

Blenheim Palace. ChatsworthHouse. Downton Abbey. The English landscape is littered with names that projecta certain image of Englishness. Like those names I just listed, this imageblends reality and fiction, and is maintained by its consistent manufacture onscreen, in literature and as tourist attractions.

To many inside this country,and beyond, the country house is a dominant feature in the cultural fabric ofEngland. It’s up there with tea, rolling green hills and the Royal Family.

How...

Did Napoleon’s troops firecannons at the pyramids of Egypt? And what was his army doing there?

Those were questions provokedby the teaser trailer for the 2023 movie Napoleon. The second of thesequestions is answered by this new book by Jonathan North, Napoleon’s Invasionof Egypt.

The book’s subtitle, ‘AnEyewitness History’, promises a wealth of firsthand accounts from the Frenchinvasion and occupation of a corner of North Africa. It delivers on thatpromise. This is a compelling account...

The Newspaper by Thomas Rowlandson (1808)

In Regency England news waspassed by word of mouth, by private letter and in the newspapers. This meantnewspapers were highly prized as a source of printed information.

As today, a wide variety ofnewspapers were published. Most were distributed locally, although some foundtheir way across the country and even abroad. Copies were passed from reader toreader, each of whom would avidly devour the contents even if it was a fewmonths old.

Newspapers ...

 Bonnets, bayonets and brilliant sunshine

9 September 2023—officially thehottest day of the year in England. It’s early and the sun’s already hot. Butthe dew is heavy on the grass outside the Holburne Museum in Bath, because it’sSeptember and summer is fading into autumn.

The annual Grand RegencyCostumed Promenade—the formal opener to the annual Jane Austen Festival in Bath—isabout to get underway.

Passersby stop to gaze and snapthe scene. Have they unexpectedly slipped backwards two hu...

This booksits on the very edge of the time period I usually write about, which is lateGeorgian through the Regency. William Schaw Lindsay was born in the middle ofthe Regency, but almost his entire adult life was during the reign of QueenVictoria.

However, itsappeal to me was the business angle. Early Victorian commercial life was notthat different to that of the Regency period. Neither was life aboard amerchant ship, which William Schaw Lindsay experienced and described, duringthe 1830...

This booksits on the very edge of the time period I usually write about, which is lateGeorgian through the Regency. William Schaw Lindsay was born in the middle ofthe Regency, but almost his entire adult life was during the reign of QueenVictoria.

However, itsappeal to me was the business angle. Early Victorian commercial life was notthat different to that of the Regency period. Neither was life aboard amerchant ship, which William Schaw Lindsay experienced and described, duringthe 1830...

Athelhampton House
Athelhampton House, in Dorset,was a 326-year-old pigsty at the start of the Regency period. The ground floorof the Tudor Great Hall, built in 1485, and the connected West Wing, had becomehome to pigs and poultry. And they had been that way for decades.

Today Athelhampton is one ofEngland’s finest Tudor mansions. It was pretty impressive when it was built, buta visitor in the Regency period would have seen it as a tired, rundown relic ofa farmhouse. Little more than an or...