Another Miscellany, Actually

These Miscellanies are catching!

First, the important (and fun!) part of this week’s Miscellany: the winner of the drawing for the ARC of Courtship and Curses is mfantaliswrites! Mfantaliswrites, please contact me via my website so that we can arrange getting your book to you.

Second: as we step into summer, our posting schedule at Nineteenteen will shift around a bit (as it usually does). We’ll be taking a couple of vacation weeks (including next week over the Independence Day holiday) and weeks in August to ferry some of our respective offspring off to college…but on the fun side, Regina and I will each be having a book launch event and we’ll do our customary blogging from the Romance Writers of America National Conference where we have our annual get-to-spend-time-together holiday. So there’s some fun stuff to look ahead to over the summer months.

Third: I’m launching a new series! Since we completed the series of brief biographies of Queen Victoria’s nine children, I thought it might be fun to do an occasional series on some of her grandchildren as well.

As a result of having nine children, the Queen ended up with quite a respectable crop of grandchildren: forty-two, in fact, though it is thought she probably had a least a few illegitimate ones that she was not informed of. Here are a few interesting statistics about them, presented in the form of a quiz--do you know their identities? (answers will be posted in the comments column):

1. Her eldest grandchild was born in 1859 when she was not quite 40, less than two years after the birth of her last child in 1857.


2. Her last grandchild was born in 1891, just ten years before her death; he himself would die in 1914, fighting against his cousin.


3. And though the queen outlived several of her grandchildren—don’t forget that the high infant mortality of the 19th century was still an issue even among royalty—her final surviving grandchild lived until 1981, dying at age 98, just a few month before the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer.

I won’t be writing about all forty-two grandchildren—not all of them lived lives of particular historical significance. But I’ll try to introduce you to some of the more historically important and interesting ones. Stay tuned!