Promo: Try Before You Trust by Constance Briones
Today, I'm delighted to welcome author Constance Briones to Ruins & Reading. We're sharing an enticing excerpt from her new novel about a female poet in Elizabethan England, Try Before You Trust: To All Gentlewomen and Other Maids in Love. Have a look!
Try Before You Trust is currently on blog tour with The Coffee Pot Book Club. Find other fabulous excerpts HERE!
“I have
a fine collection of books suitable for your training here. Books that will
reinforce the virtues of womanhood and housewifery skills. What say you? Are
they of interest to you?”
My
disappointment caused a surge of resentment to well inside me. Nay, they are
not. I have a hunger to read books that are deemed unsuitable for our sex. Do
you really believe that women need men to control what we read because of our
weak nature? That we will be unduly influenced by romantic tales, leading us
astray from the path of virtue? I don’t believe that –no matter how vigorously
the church fathers preach it from their pulpits.
Zounds! I wish I had said that. Instead, inculcated by the teachings of my mother and
father, I followed proper decorum. “And the reading of scripture is also important, my lady.”
Her smile became more inviting. “How is your hand with the needle, Isabella?”
The needle — how I hated it. Did she expect me to devote the little leisure time I would have to needlework and not read nor write poetry? I didn’t wince but smiled, “Quite competent, my lady.”
What if Taylor Swift found herself penning songs about love in Elizabethan England when women were required to be chaste, obedient, and silent?
Isabella Whitney, an ambitious and daring eighteen-year-old maidservant turned poet, sets out to do just that. Having risked reputation and virtue by allowing her passions for her employer's aristocratic nephew to get the better of her, Isabella Whitney enters the fray of the pamphlet wars, a scurrilous debate on the merits of women.
She's determined to make her mark by becoming the first woman to write a poem defending women in love, highlighting the deceptive practices of the men who woo them. Her journey to publication is fraught with challenges as she navigates through the male-dominated literary world and the harsh realities of life in sixteenth-century London for a single woman.
Loosely based on the life of Elizabethan poet Isabella Whitney, this is a compelling tale of a young woman's resilience and determination to challenge the status quo and leave her mark in a world that was not ready for her.
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