February 25th, 2002

As a Canadian I just cannot keep from grinning ear to ear today.

I don't think anyone outside my country can grasp how much of our national consciousness is tied up in hockey, and now we are the Olympic gold champions in both men's and women's hockey!!!  Thank you to all of the team members who so valiantly and gallantly played our game and made us, as a nation, proud.

But also, this is to all of the Olympic atheletes, winners and those whose pride was in the striving:
We are proud of you all, Craotion, Lithuanian, Canadian, American, Australian, Bahamian and yes, Russian.  We know how hard you work and what a toll you pay mentally and physically, and we congratulate you.  Just being at the Olympics was a grand achievement, and you all deserve to be proud of yourselves.

Congratulations especially, if I might be patriotic again, to Jamie and David, who kept their cool when everyone around them was losing it, and to Bourne and Kraatz for their marvelous sense of humor when things didn't go the way they planned.  And especially to Elvis Stojko.  Elvis, win or lose, you are the champion of our hearts.

           Spring is coming...

          This Month in the Regency - February/March

Today In Literary History

Website of the Month - February/March

Views and Reviews - Belle Of The Ball - Exciting DIK designation (Desert Island Keeper status) from All About Romance! 

Donna's Latest Release - A Rake's Redemption! - Read an excerpt!!!  And the great Four Star review from The Romance Reader!!!

Also, my Real Romances titles, writing as Charlotte Bennett!  Read the Scribe's World Four and Five Star reviews! 

Breaking News!!!

Spring is coming...

From: Work Without Hope
Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1772 - 1834

All Nature seems at work.  Slugs leave their lair-
   The bees are stirring - birds are on the wing-
And Winter slumbering in the open air, 
   Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.

From: The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations - Third Edition

Blue Text From: Our Tempestuous Day - Carolly Erickson - William Morrow & Company, Inc., New York. - Published 1986 

February 2nd, 1870 - Mark Twain, 34, marries Olivia Langdon in Elmira NY. Has anyone else seen Ken Burn's magnificent documentary on Mark Twain's life, broadcast in January?  Fascinating character study.

February 5th, 1881 - Historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle dies in London at 85.  "A well-written life," he once said, "is almost as rare as a well-spent one."  A book I have just finished, 'Chelsea', by Thea Holme, detailed much of the Carlyle's life in that London suburb.  It was such a vivid picture, of him and Jane, his wife, walking the embankment of an evening, watching the boats on the river, strolling past the Pensioners of the Royal Hospital sitting outside and smoking peacefully.  Very evocative.

February 10th, 1862 - Dante Gabriel Rossetti returns from a night on the town with Algernon Charles Swinburne to discover his wife, Elizabeth, lying on the floor, having taken a fatal overdose of laudanum. - Coincidentally, Rossetti figures in the book Chelsea, as well.  It is shortly after this tragedy that he will move to that suburb.  He would live there for twenty years until his death in 1882.  Thea Holme has a slightly different tale of that night, February 10th, but the end result was the same.  Poor Lizzie was dead, and in her coffin Rossetti placed his unpublished poems.

February 29th, 45 B.C. - Julius Caesar adjusts 46 B.C. - known as the Year of Confusion with its 445 days - by fixing 365 days and 6 hours as the length of a year, with one day intercalated every four years, a leap.

March 2nd, 1797 - Horace Walpole, fourth Earl of Orford and author of The Castle of Otranto, dies in London at 79.  Father of the gothic novel???

March 11th, 1818 - Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley is published.

Match 15th, 1820 - In his journal Lord Byron calls John Keats "A tadpole of the Lakes." Now, wasn't that rude?  And what had Keats ever done to him?

March 25th, 1811 - Percy Bysshe Shelley is expelled from Oxford for refusing to admit writing The Necessity of Atheism - Geez, what would have happened if he had admitted it?

March 30th, 1820 - English writer Anna Sewell, author of Black Beauty, the Autobiography of a Horse, is born in Norwich - Okay, I am really trying to come to terms with the idea of a horse autobiography!  What next, Mr. Ed as ghostwriter to Secretariat??

Facts in maroon are taken from A Book of Days for the Literary Year - Edited by Neal T. Jones - Thames and Hudson - 1984  Comments in blue are all my own fault.

  Miss Phaedra Gillian is the epitome of the English vicar's daughter.  Innocent, hard-working, well-intentioned, she is a pillar of the community and a delight to all.  And she is happy with her life... truly!  If she sometimes feels envious of Deborah Daintry, the local squire's daughter, who looks ahead to a lifetime of love with her beau, Baron Fossey, who could blame her?

   A hardened rake, the Earl of Hardcastle, Lawrence Jamieson, is known in London society as 'Hardhearted Hardcastle'.  Not for him the tenderer feelings.  And so, when he beggars the youthful Baron Fossey in a card game, winning from him his entire estate, the sole support of his widowed mother and sister and the hope of his future, it is not unexpected that he rides through the night after Fossey, whom he suspects of reneging.

   But luck, in the guise of a highwayman's attack, is on the side of poor young Fossey.

   The fact that it happened outside of the home of the deliciously lovely Phaedra Gillian, and that she, good Christian woman as she is, takes in the poor beaten stranger... well, what will happen when the most dissolute rake in London meets the most moral young woman of Oxfordshire?

   Sparks will fly and a passionate wager will determine whether the upstanding Miss Gillian remains an innocent...

---

The sequel to Miss Truelove Beckons

Belle Of the Ball

DIK from AAR

I am so excited that AAR (All About Romance) gave Belle Of The Ball its highest rating, DIK (Desert Island Keeper) status, an 'A'.  Robin Nixon Uncapher says...

"What I liked about this book was the convincing way that Donna Simpson describes a woman who desperately needs to secure her future."  "More and more I find that heroes and heroines in romance novels run together in my mind.  Even in books I like very much, I seldom remember the names of lead characters.  In Belle Of The Ball, I got a heroine who stands in my memory as a real person."

Belle Of the Ball!
Romantic Times gives Belle Four Stars!

"Donna Simpson offers a wealth of Regency delights as her skills continue to bloom."

   Reader Judy M. Says..."I have just finished Belle of the Ball, and I think it is your best 
book yet."