Exclusive interview with Elizabeth Kerri Mohan
Rating: 4 Stars
Reviewed by Gabrielle Pantera
“It dawned on me that I had written about three women in one family who were all scandalous,” says Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History’s Most Notorious Women author Elizabeth Kerri Mohan. “Mrs. Keppel who was the mistress of Edward VII of England, her daughter Violet Trefusis who was the lover of Vita Sackville-West, and Mrs. Keppel’s great-granddaughter Camilla Parker-Bowles, who was the mistress of Prince Charles, and now is his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall.” Scandalous Women gives succinct biographies of some of the most fascinating women in history. Their lives are revealed showing the high and low points in their lives. The chapter titles include Warrior Queens, Scintillating Seductresses, Wild Women of the West and Amazing Adventuresses. A total of 35 different women are in this book. Mohan is entertaining and even humorous at times. Whether it’s less familiar biographies like Vita Sackville-West and Emilie du Chatelet, or the ones everyone knows like Cleopatra and Eleanor of Aquitaine, the women’s lives are fascinating. “The idea for Scandalous Women came about three and half years ago when I started the blog of the same name,” says Mohan. “I’m a huge history junkie and I love to read about women who were different or who made waves. I find them fascinating, because it was very hard to break out of the social mores of the time. Most of these women were censured for not following the rules.” Mohan started blogging on a lark and was surprised so many people responded to the stories of the women that she wrote about. “At first, I stuck to women who were more well known such as Cleopatra, but soon I began looking for stories of women who weren’t as well known such Jane Digby and Emilie du Chatelet. It wasn’t until I lost my day job that it occurred to me that Scandalous Women could really be a book.” Mohan tried to read at least three or four books for each woman that she wrote about. “There are 35 women in the book, so that’s a lot of books,” says Mohan. “I also read their entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography if they were English. I stuck to general biographies for each for the most part, and ones that had been written in the last twenty years. A few of the women in the book had written autobiographies, such as Ida Wells-Barnett and Lola Montez.” “A great deal of my research took place at Schwartzman building of the New York Public Library, which is their research library,” says Mohan. “Not all the books that I needed were available to check out, and I couldn’t afford to buy all the books that I needed for my research, although I did buy as many books as I possibly could.” Mohan says a major challenge was the word count. “I only had about seven pages for each woman. That was hard. There was a lot that had to hit the cutting room floor. Lola Montez…I could have written 400 pages on. Her life was just so vast even though she died in her early forties.” Mohan is currently working on a novel that is set in England. She was a semi-finalist in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest a few years ago for a young adult novel called Much Ado About High School. Mohan lives in New York and is a native. Mohan’s blog is http:// scandalouswoman.blogspot.com
Scandalous Women, Trade Paperback, 320 pages, Publisher: Perigee Trade (March 1, 2011), Language: EnglishISBN13: 9780399536458 $15.00
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