Posts Categorized: Her Own Devices

I’m happy to let folks know that Magnificent Devices editions are proliferating like tadpoles in spring! Er, wait. Like pumpkins at Hallowe’en! That’s better. What’s new, you ask? Why, simply these: A Lady of Resources is now available in print, for those who like to see spines on their bookshelves (and goodness knows our girls…

Even in the 1800s, the hospital known as Bedlam (Bethlehem Royal Hospital) was separated from the general neighborhood by a wall. Imagination supplied location and height in Her Own Devices, but when I was onsite, I wanted to see how accurage both might be. Here’s a passage: Their single greatest advantage was that the walls of…

My experience at the Imperial War Museum (formerly Bedlam) was a strange combination of eerie recognition and the validation an author feels when she got something just right. In walking around the grounds, I had known something about the layout thanks to Google Earth. But my imagination had embroidered facts with story details—gardens, roses, benches,…

In 19th-century London, the word Bedlam was enough to produce a shudder in rich and poor alike. The insane were incarcerated there, as well as women who enjoyed sex too much and people whose political views were troublesome and needed to be discredited. In the 1700s, it was a popular destination for those who wanted…

Copyright 2011 by Shelley Adina. All rights reserved. Chapter 1  London, August 1889 They were too small to be airships, and too ephemeral to be bombs. Glowing with a gentle orange light, each the size of a lantern, they floated up into the night sky powered by a single candle and the most delicate of…