Notice bibliographique
- Notice
Type(s) de contenu et mode(s) de consultation : Texte noté : sans médiation
Auteur(s) : Eyre, Hermione
Titre(s) : Viper wine [Texte imprimé] : a novel / Hermione Eyre
Publication : London : J. Cape, 2014
Description matérielle : 440 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
Note(s) : Includes bibliographical references (p. 437-439)
At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I are beginning to
look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure
are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper
Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice. Famed beauty
Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry
and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now
she is married and her "mid-climacteric" approaches, all that adoration has curdled
to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm
Digby - alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller - believes
he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he
will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it. From the whispering
court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in
crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a
glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the
Countess of Arundel's snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into
Venetia's black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632
rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century
beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath
the Thames
Identifiants, prix et caractéristiques : ISBN 9780224097598 (hardback). - ISBN 0224097598 (hardback)
Identifiant de la notice : ark:/12148/cb43900545s
Notice n° :
FRBNF43900545
(notice reprise d'un réservoir extérieur)