Hi everyone and thank you to Fresh Fiction for inviting me to blog today. It’s lovely to be here! Ever since my Scandalous Women of the Ton Series launched last year I’ve been asked by readers just how authentic is the historical background to the series. We are accustomed to think that women’s lives in the late 18th and early 19th century were very circumscribed. Diaries and the novels and letters of authors such as Jane Austen suggest as much; Jane, for example, though a mature woman, could not travel if there was not a male family member available to accompany her. Such were the rules and regulations of society. But of course where there are rules there are always women willing to break them. It was these exceptions that I wanted to explore in my series. Each of the Scandalous Women of the Ton books features a heroine who has done something that outrages society in a different way. In WHISPER OF SCANDAL Lady Joanna Ware travels to Spitsbergen in Northern Norway. Foreign travel was considered quite beyond the pale in a woman and even unfeminine and indelicate. Yet Lady Joanna was based on a real life lady traveller,…