Newsletter Announcement!

Well, friends, the Bridgerton saga is now complete and what a wild ride it has been! We laughed (I hope!), we didn’t cry (or did we?), we learned some new things (you can suck bee venom out of a sting?!), and now it’s time to say goodbye to the Alphabet Bunch.

I’ve been thinking about what to write here next, and decided it was time for a pivot. We’ll probably revisit the “Snarker’s Guide to Romance” at some point in the future – yours truly recently branched out to Lisa Kleypas’ Wallflower series so there is plenty of material – but I am a fickle writer and what I want right now is a change. So we are going to side-step from the realm of fiction into that of history with a series I think I’m going to call:

Nothing But the Naughty Bits

I’ve been a history nerd since I was a kid, but I’m the kind of history nerd whose favourite part of history is the human interest story. I don’t care about wars and geopolitics but give me a good scandal – especially anything that involves love, sex and/or murder – and I am ALL EARS. Historical scandals are a reliable panacea to present-day anxieties. Their remoteness makes them low-stakes, which means we can indulge our rubbernecking instinct without guilt – all the players have been dead for centuries. Some people have their favourite true crime stories; I have my favourite historical scandals. And, now, I’m going to share some of them with you.

The plan is to keep things generally light, fun and snarky; this newsletter is called Trifle Thoughts for a reason. I am not a historian so caveat, reader and all that, but I will include a selected bibliography for each scandal. Feel free to fact-check me, but more importantly – to read more about the topic at your leisure. I am going to apologize in advance for the Euro-centric focus of the series, but Western European history is what I know best and, tbh, it’s what I feel comfortable snarking on. I am going to choose scandals that are hopefully less familiar to a modern audience because who wants to hear about Henry VIII’s marital saga AGAIN? His sister Mary’s marital travails on the other hand? Mmmm, a definite possibility. Her husbands were messy AF and most people probably couldn’t name either of them. Obscure and juicy is how we like our historical scandals.

Next week, we are going to kick off “Nothing But the Naughty Bits” with my favourite historical scandal of all: the Affair of the Tour de Nesle. I don’t want to give too much away but, spoiler alert, it involves 2 separate dynasties, treasonous adultery, several (alleged) royal murders … and it all ended with a huge-ass war.