Download or read book The Virgin Courtesan Mills Boon Historical Undone written by Michelle Kelly and published by HarperCollins UK. This book was released on 2013-11-01 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Penniless and homeless, beautiful Juliana Hearnshaw’s virginity is her most bankable asset, and now the gently-bred young woman must sell herself to a wealthy, elderly patron who will pay handsomely for her company.

Download or read book The Courtesan Countess written by JoMarie DeGioia and published by Bailey Park Publishing. This book was released on 2020-09-12 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A gentleman who masks his emotions A lady who pretends to be something she’s not Secret desires…secret pleasures And a love to reveal both their hearts Left destitute and ruined, Marianne Ellsworth has one option left. She has to become a courtesan to keep her family safe. Their future depends on her younger sister marrying a rich man, and the money Marianne makes allows them to circulate in London society. As the great-granddaughter of an earl, she knows full well that society will turn on them should her secret be revealed. Marcus Lacey, the Earl of Lacey, must wed soon to satisfy his father's will. Though considered cold and reserved, he is captivated by the woman purchased for his pleasure. Unable to think of her with another man, he pays for her exclusivity through the Season. Marianne struggles to maintain her masquerade, avoiding Marcus in company even as she is losing her heart to him. Marcus is falling for his mistress, charmed by her grace and warmth as well as her sensuality. He craves her, heart and soul, but must bow to his obligations by the Season’s end. Will Marcus cast her aside if he discovers her deception? Or will he keep her secret along with her heart?

Download or read book The Book of the Courtesans written by Susan Griffin and published by Crown. This book was released on 2002-02-06 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer-Prize-nominated author Susan Griffin comes an unprecedented, provocative look at the dazzling world of the West’s first independent women, whose lively liaisons brought them unspoken influence, wealth, and freedom. While they charmed some of Europe’s most illustrious men honing their social skills as well as their sexual ones, the great courtesans gained riches, power, education, and sexual freedom in a time when other women were denied all of these. From Imperia of sixteenth-century Rome, who personified the Renaissance ideal of beauty; Mme. de Pompadour, the arbiter of all things fashionable in eighteenth-century Paris and Versailles; Liane de Pougy, known in France during the Belle Epoque as “Our National Courtesan”; to Sarah Bernhardt, who, following in her mother’s footsteps, supported herself in her early career with a second profession, The Book of the Courtesans tells the life stories and intricacies of the lavish lifestyles of these women. Unlike their geisha counterparts, courtesans neither lived in brothels nor bent their wills to suit their suitors. They were strong- willed, autonomous, and plucky. An open secret, their presence can be felt throughout our culture. The muses who enflamed the hearts and imaginations of our most celebrated artists, they were also artists in their own right. They wrote poetry and novels, invented the cancan at the Moulin Rouge, and presented celebrated acts at the Folies Bergères. They helped to influence and shape the sensibility of modern literature, painting, and fashion. When Greek sculptor Praxiteles wanted to depict Venus he used a famous courtesan as a model, as in later centuries Titian, Veronese, Raphael, Giorgione, and Boucher did when they painted goddesses. When Marcel Proust was a young man it was the courtesan Laure Hayman who took him under her wing, introducing him to the right people, and providing inspiration for one of literature’s greatest masterpieces. And they often had considerable political influence too. When King Louis XV needed advice on foreign affairs or appointments of state he turned to Jeanne du Barry as well as Pompadour. In her witty and insightful prose, as Griffin celebrates these alluring and fascinating women, she restores a lost legacy of women’s history. She gives us the stories of these amazing women who, starting from impoverished or unimpressive beginnings, garnered chateaux, fine coaches, fabulous collections of jewelry, and even aristocratic titles along the way. And through a brilliant exploration of their extraordinary abilities, skills, and talents which Griffin playfully categorizes as their virtues "Timing, Beauty, Cheek, Brilliance, Gaiety, Grace, and Charm" her book explains how, while helping themselves, through their often outrageous, always entertaining examples, the great courtesans not only enriched our cultural heritage but helped to liberate women from the social, sexual, and economic strictures that confined them. Intensively researched and beautifully crafted, The Book of the Courtesans delves into scintillating but often hidden worlds, telling stories gleaned from many sources, including courtesans’ memoirs, presented along with stunning rare photographs to create memorable portraits of some of the most pivotal figures in women’s history.

Download or read book Respect for Christmas written by Grace Burrowes and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Grace Burrowes is a romance treasure." -Tessa DareHenrietta Whitlow is leaving behind the life of a very successful courtesan in hopes of making peace with her family in the shires. Michael Brenner's family all but ignore him, despite his shiny new baronial title, and his errand along the Oxford road isn't half so benign as Henrietta's. While trying to settle a debt of honor involving Henrietta, Michael instead loses his heart, gains a friend, and learns an important holiday lesson.

Download or read book Portrait of a Lady written by Victoria Vale and published by Victoria Vale. This book was released on 2019-07-29 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Book 1 of 5 in the Regency Erotic Romance series,The Gentleman Courtesans. Miss Evelyn Coburn refuses to die a virgin. At the age of five-and-twenty, she has never even been kissed properly. Upon receiving her inheritance, she decides to investigate rumors of a secret London agency which provides the services of male courtesans. Someone to teach her the secrets of the bedchamber and do away with the nuisance of her maidenhead is all Evelyn anticipates from such an arrangement. The Honourable Hugh Radcliffe is in dire financial straits after being disowned by his family for pursuing a career as a portraitist. When he’s asked to go into business to form The Gentleman Courtesans, he agrees, needing the income until his work is accepted into the Royal Academy of the Arts’ annual Summer Exhibition—an event that could earn him the exposure needed to launch him to fame. The arrangement with Evelyn is only supposed to be temporary, and Hugh is determined for her to be his last paramour. But when physical attraction evolves into a deeper connection, she becomes the muse for his greatest work of art yet. With their affair coming to an end, Hugh will be forced to acknowledge that Evelyn is the key to his success as well as his joy. Will their newfound happiness end when their arrangement does, or will what began as a matter of lust and convenience lead to true and lasting love?

Download or read book A Pregnant Courtesan for the Rake written by Diane Gaston and published by Harlequin. This book was released on 2017-11-01 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A passionate encounter in Paris leads a rake to reform his ways in this Regency romance of forbidden desire and secret identities. It’s been more than three months, but Oliver Gregory still remembers the exquisite night he shared with a beautiful woman in Paris. Discovering her working at the discreet London gentlemen’s club he owns comes as a shock . . . even more so when he realizes she’s pregnant! Oliver knows the pain of being an outcast. And he will do all in his power to ensure his child is not born illegitimate. Cecilia will return to his bed . . . as his wife!

Download or read book A Courtesan s Scandal written by Julia London and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-09-03 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times bestselling author Julia London is at her best in this sensual Regency where a Duke must pretend his mistress is his wife. Kate Bergeron is the beautiful and mysterious former mistress of a cloth merchant...and the latest beauty to capture the interest of the Prince of Wales. Mired in a disastrous divorce, the Prince attempts to distract attention from his next amorous pursuit by ordering Grayson Christopher, the eligible Duke of Darlington, to pretend to London society that he is having an affair with Kate. When Grayson reluctantly agrees to his Prince's demand, he finds the lady no more willing than he is. Kate will grudgingly act the part in public, but her favors are not for sale to any man. As Grayson and Kate mimic ardor for the world to see, they find what started as a deception becoming all too real. And when passion flames into love, their predicament becomes extreme. For while marriage between a duke and a courtesan could never happen, Kate knows in her heart that she is willing to accept nothing less...

Download or read book The Courtesan Duchess written by Joanna Shupe and published by Zebra Books. This book was released on 2015-04-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wickedly sexy Regency romance series debut, a Duchess plays seductress in a cunning scheme that leads to love. Julia, Duchess of Colton, has a cunning plan to banish her debts. All she has to do is seduce her estranged husband—an undertaking that proves to be as wickedly pleasurable as it is improper. After learning the secrets of Juliet Leighton, London's leading courtesan, she travels to Venice in disguise as Juliet. Now all she has to do is locate her husband, conceive an heir, and voila, her future is secure! It’s a foolproof plan. After all, Julia’s husband has not bothered to lay eyes on her in eight years, since their hasty wedding day when she was only sixteen. But what begins as a tempestuous flirtation escalates into full-blown passion—and the feeling is mutual! Could the man she married actually turn out to be the love of her life?

Download or read book The Christmas Secret written by Julia London and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Eireanne O'Conner returns to Ballynaheath, her home in Ireland, for Christmas, she finds that her brother has married, her new sister-in-law’s family is ever-present, and her friends, the Hannigan twins (Year of Living Scandalously) are up to their usual tricks. During the twelve days of Christmas, there are secrets and surprises that will either sink Eireanne deeper into the scandals that have surrounded her family, or send her to London to find a titled husband who will hopefully add some dignity to a family who can’t seem to keep away from scandal!

Download or read book The Mistress of Paris written by Catherine Hewitt and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "First published in the United Kingdom by Icon Books Ltd"--Title page verso.

Download or read book The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson Volumes One and Two written by Harriette Wilson and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2018-04-07 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson", Harriette Wilson. Harriette Wilson was a celebrated British Regency courtesan (1786-1845).

Download or read book Courtesans Concubines and the Cult of Female Fidelity written by Beverly Jo Bossler and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity traces changing gender relations in China from the tenth to fourteenth centuries. By taking women--and men's relationships with women--seriously, this book makes a case for the centrality of gender relations in the social, political, and intellectual life of the Song and Yuan dynasties.

Download or read book His Brazen Tart written by Victoria Vale and published by Victoria Vale. This book was released on 2021-09-29 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widowhood has offered Joan Durbin the chance to experience life as she never has before. When rumors of an agency of male courtesans in London bring her face to face with Sir Piers Lovelace, she is introduced to a world of enticing pleasures—those of domination and submission, pleasure and discipline, and utter abandon. Unlike most Gentleman Courtesans, Piers is a paramour to wealthy women not out of financial need—but because it allows for illicit affairs with no strings attached. After a previous heartbreak, Piers has no interest in being trapped into marriage by the devious ladies of high society. But Joan Durbin is unlike any woman Piers has ever known. Her brazen nature and uninhibited charm make it difficult to remember that their arrangement is one of pleasurable business only. Neither of them is looking for love … but both will be hard-pressed to deny it's call.

Download or read book The Honest Courtesan written by Margaret F. Rosenthal and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2012-07-13 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Venetian courtesan has long captured the imagination as a female symbol of sexual license, elegance, beauty, and unruliness. What then to make of the cortigiana onesta—the honest courtesan who recast virtue as intellectual integrity and offered wit and refinement in return for patronage and a place in public life? Veronica Franco (1546-1591) was such a woman, a writer and citizen of Venice, whose published poems and familiar letters offer rich testimony to the complexity of the honest courtesan's position. Margaret F. Rosenthal draws a compelling portrait of Veronica Franco in her cultural social, and economic world. Rosenthal reveals in Franco's writing a passionate support of defenseless women, strong convictions about inequality, and, in the eroticized language of her epistolary verses, the seductive political nature of all poetic contests. It is Veronica Franco's insight into the power conflicts between men and women—and her awareness of the threat she posed to her male contemporaries—that makes her literary works and her dealings with Venetian intellectuals so pertinent today. Combining the resources of biography, history, literary theory, and cultural criticism, this sophisticated interdisciplinary work presents an eloquent and often moving account of one woman's life as an act of self-creation and as a complex response to social forces and cultural conditions. "A book . . . pleasurably redolent of Venice in the 16th-century. Rosenthal gives a vivid sense of a world of salons and coteries, of intricate networks of family and patronage, and of literary exchanges both intellectual and erotic."—Helen Hackett, Times Higher Education Supplement The Honest Courtesan is the basis for the film Dangerous Beauty (1998) directed by Marshall Herskovitz. (The film was re-titled The Honest Courtesan for release in the UK and Europe in 1999.)

Download or read book Pleasure Me written by Monica Burns and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Assassin's Honor, a bold and sexy new historical romance. Youth and beauty are a courtesan's greatest assets. Concerned, at forty-one, that she is no longer desirable, Lady Ruth Attwood is uncertain whether to be offended or flattered when a younger man makes her an unusual offer. In need of funds, she agrees. But then she does the unthinkable-she falls in love...

Download or read book Shanghai Love written by Catherine Vance Yeh and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating book, Catherine Yeh explores the Shanghai entertainment world at the close of the Qing dynasty. Established in the 1850s outside of the old walled city, the Shanghai Foreign Settlements were administered by Westerners and so were not subject to the strict authority of the Chinese government. At the center of the dynamic new culture that emerged was the courtesan, whose flamboyant public lifestyle and conspicuous consumption of modern goods set a style that was emulated by other women as they emerged from the "inner quarters" of traditional Chinese society. Many Chinese visitors and sojourners were drawn to the Foreign Settlements. Men of letters seeking a living outside of the government bureaucracy found work in the Settlements’ burgeoning print industry and formed the new class of urban intellectuals. Courtesans fled from oppressive treatment and the turmoil of uprisings elsewhere in China and found unprecedented freedom in Shanghai to redefine themselves and their profession. As the entertainment industry developed, publications sprang up to report on and promote it. Journalists and courtesans found that their interests increasingly coincided, and the Settlements became a cosmopolitan playground. Ritualized role-play based on novels such as Dream of the Red Chamber elevated the status of courtesan entertainment and led to culturally rich interactions between courtesans and their clients. As participants acted out the stories in public, they introduced modern notions of love and romance that were radically at odds with the traditional roles of men and women. Yet because social change arrived in the form of entertainment, it met with little resistance. Yeh shows how this fortuitous combination of people and circumstances, rather than official decisions or acts, created the first multicultural modern city in China. With illustrations from newspapers, novels, travel guides, and postcards, as well as contemporary written descriptions of life in foreign-driven, fast-paced, cutting-edge Shanghai, this study traces the mutual influences among courtesans, intellectuals, and the city itself in creating a modern, market-oriented leisure culture in China. Historians, literary specialists, art critics, and social scientists will welcome this captivating foray into the world of late nineteenth-century popular culture.

Download or read book The Christmas Courtesan written by Victoria Vale and published by Victoria Vale. This book was released on 2021-06-28 with total page 126 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Widows Four is a standalone tie-in series connected to The Gentleman Courtesans series by Victoria Vale. Widowed Lady Miranda Hughes wants to indulge in something wicked—something she might never have dared to do as a young, unwed debutante. The rumors of male courtesans operating secretly in London have piqued her interest, so she hires one for an illicit rendezvous during a Christmas house party. Roger Thornton's desperation to provide a dowry for his sister pushes him to moonlight as a secret courtesan. What begins as a convenient affair blossoms into more as Roger and Miranda find in one another the things they have been missing. But, will a scandalous discovery ruin their chances for a happy future? Previously published as part of the Christmas anthology, Have Yourself a Merry Little Scandal. This standalone version features a bonus epilogue.