Stephanie Barron

"Christmas Eve, 1814: Jane Austen has been invited to spend the holiday with family and friends at The Vyne, the gorgeous ancestral home of the wealthy and politically prominent Chute family. As the year fades and friends begin to gather beneath the mistletoe for the twelve days of Christmas festivities, Jane and her circle are in a celebratory mood: Mansfield Park is selling nicely; Napoleon has been banished to Elba; British forces have seized Washington,...

"November, 1815. The Battle of Waterloo has come and gone, leaving the British economy in shreds; Henry Austen, high-flying banker extraordinaire, is about to declare bankruptcy dragging several of his brothers down with him. The crisis destroys Henry's health, and Jane flies to his London bedside, believing him to be dying. While she's there, the Reverend James Stanier Clarke, chaplain to His Royal Highness the Prince Regent, invites Jane to tour...

The Paris Wife meets PBS's Victoria in this enthralling novel of the life and loves of one of history's most remarkable women: Winston Churchill's scandalous American mother, Jennie Jerome. Wealthy, privileged, and fiercely independent New Yorker Jennie Jerome took Victorian England by storm when she landed on its shores. As Lady Randolph Churchill, she gave birth to a man who defined the twentieth century: her son Winston. But Jennie--reared in the...

Six decades after Virginia Woolf's death, landscape designer Jo Bellamy has come to Sissinghurst Castle for two reasons: to study the celebrated White Garden created by Woolf's lover Vita Sackville-West and to recover from the terrible wound of her grandfather's unexplained suicide. In the shadow of one of England's most famous castles, Jo makes a shocking find that will lead her on a perilous journey into the tumultuous inner life of a literary icon....

During the Cold War (1949-89) in both Germanys, the creation of art, its reception, and its theorization were closely linked to their respective political systems: the Western liberal democracy of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the Eastern communist dictatorship of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). In reaction against the legacy of Nazism, both Germanys revived pre-World War II German artistic traditions. This exhibition examines the...