By Time Divided by Elaine Jeremiah - Guest Post, Excerpt and Giveaway

Elaine Jeremiah is visiting us today with her new book, By Time Divided. This is a follow up to Love Without Time. You can read more about the first book on the previous post. Elaine has an excerpt from By Time Divided (which doesn't have spoilers for the first book), a guest post on Bath, where Jane Austen lived for a while, and a giveaway of both books in ebook format. Read on for more details!

Book Description for ‘By Time Divided’

Having accidentally time travelled to Regency England, Jane Austen fan Cassie Taylor finds herself unexpectedly back in the twenty-first century. But everything has changed. She’s been missing for three weeks and her parents are upset and disbelieving when she tells them where she’s been. The police aren’t too pleased either.

Cassie’s best friend Mia doubts the story, yet stands by her friend. And then the unthinkable happens when both of them end up in Regency England. Now Cassie has an even bigger problem: Mia is mixed race and they’re stuck in an era where the slave trade has only just been abolished. Cassie must somehow explain herself to her Regency friends – why she vanished and who her friend is. She also needs to find Ted, the love of her life.

How will Cassie manage to protect Mia from the insults of Regency people who see her as worthless? And how will she ever find a way for her and Ted and Mia to finally return home?

Trip to Bath - Part 2

Part 1 of this saw us as far as the Assembly Rooms, where we collapsed, exhausted, and fortified ourselves on a panini and a pot of tea.  The tea worked its magic, as always, and we went downstairs to see the Fashion Museum.  This was something my mum particularly wanted to see, but we both thoroughly enjoyed it.  You have an audio tour which I hadn't done before, but it was really easy, the exhibits have a number to put into your machine, and you just input the number, press go and it will tell you about what you're looking at.

I love history when it can be brought to life, and this is something I really felt in the Fashion Museum, because this is not just the style of clothes that would have been worn at such and such a date, but genuine clothes that date from those times, that were worn by real people and in some cases we even know whose clothes they were. The Fashion Museum's audio tour encouraged me to take photos and I took a lot of them! Hopefully you'll find some of the following of interest.

These are some of the earlier dresses in there.  This one is a 'sack back' dress (that orangey thing you can see in the background is a man's dressing gown!)

This style of dress was another early one. The dress itself is open at the front, the white part is a separate petticoat.

Bit of nightwear here, how glam is this (below)!

Now, you know in historical novels, sometimes they'll mention a court dress, and say what a ridiculous garment it was? Well I saw this (below) and my jaw just dropped. Without exaggeration, I would say that you would be wider than you are tall wearing this dress, it's utterly insane.  The sides were held out with cane in the dress.

To drum up business for court dresses mantua makers would have a sample court dress that they would take to potential customers' homes but since they obviously couldn't take a real dress they had a little mini one, and they had one of those in the museum, in the foreground of the picture below.

You may be forgiven for thinking, from the photos I've posted that it's only ladies' clothes, but there are clothes for the gents too.  These are from the early 1800s I believe.

You can see the dates on the clothes below, let's take a minute to imagine some of Jane Austen's characters in these clothes from around 200 years ago.  The coat on the left belonged to Lord Byron's wife.

I really enjoyed the Victorian clothes, there was a wonderful array on show, including the petticoats Victorian ladies would wear to ensure the shape of their dresses was correct but not too heavy.  I'd heard of crinolines, but I didn't realise that they were basically a cage style of petticoat.

Obviously black was a big thing in Victorian fashion, due to Queen Victoria mourning her husband for fifty years.  They even had a dress that belonged to Queen Victoria herself, which surprised me by just how big it was. I'd seen photos, but it was good to see in real life, helped with scale. Since this is black it was hard to photo, forgive the flash!

The displays go on to show more modern, designer clothes and here are some of Princess Diana's dresses, including her going away dress from her wedding day (the coral one in the middle).  These are owned by her sons, but have been lent to the museum, and the display includes the designs of the clothes and notes that she wrote to the designer.

I so enjoyed the Fashion Museum! They even have a section for you to dress up, so you can try huge petticoats and corsets etc. They have children's clothes available to try on too, but to be honest I think you'd miss out on a lot on a visit here if you had to take children with you unless they were old enough to be engaged by the audio tour. I will leave you with a gratuitous bonnet selfie :)

Trip to Bath - Part 1

I've been to Bath quite a few times, but always for the Christmas market. Last year I promised myself that I'd take a trip to Bath and look at some nice Austen-y things, and last week my mother and I caught the train, and just about an hour later we pulled into Bath. We had about 6 hours there, and frankly I need to go again, because there is more that I want to see!

If you haven't been to Bath and you get the opportunity you should definitely go, it's such a gorgeous place. It's a World Heritage site and even if you don't go and see any of the attractions it's still a beautiful place to walk around, the architecture is just something else.  Knowing that our time in Bath was limited we had to choose a few things to see as a priority, so we headed off from the station past the cathedral.  No time to go in unfortunately, but even from the outside it's impressive:

We went to the Jane Austen Centre, where we heard a short talk on Jane Austen's life and specifically the time she spent in Bath. From the sound of it her parents were very fond of the place, and in fact they met in Bath.  After Mr Austen retired as a clergyman they settled in Bath, and were comfortable enough, but after he died their income was reduced meaning that they had to move to less and less attractive accommodation as time went on.  I really enjoyed seeing the exhibition here, which gave insight into both Jane Austen's life, and life in general at that time.  There was a tearoom here that I was sorely tempted to try out, but there was no time, there were sights to be seen.  We went on to have a wander down the Gravel Walk, which is referred to in Persuasion - this is where Anne and Captain Wentworth go after she has read the letter:

"...soon words enough had passed between them to decide their direction towards the comparatively quiet and retired gravel-walk, where the power of conversation would make the present hour a blessing indeed; and prepare for it all the immortality which the happiest recollections of their own future lives could bestow. There they exchanged again those feelings and those promises which had once before seemed to secure every thing, but which had been followed by so many, many years of division and estrangement."

The Gravel Walk is a cut through to the Royal Crescent which is probably one of the most lovely streets I've ever walked down.

There is a house here which is decorated in Georgian Style but we didn't have time to go in and see it, something I definitely want to do next time!  It's the house on the far right of the picture above.  Instead we just walked along the road and pretended we lived there. There is a hotel along this stretch and lots of homes which were under renovation.  These houses are crazy expensive for terraced properties, but they really are beautiful.

We then went to see another of our must-see sights of the day, the Assembly Rooms. Feast your eyes on this...

Wow!  You can just imagine dancing happening here. There was so much gorgeous detailing in this building. Just look at the ceiling of this room.

There were three rooms you could see, the one I've shown above, the Octagon Room, that was used for cards, and what was the tea room.  This is also a lovely room, but it can be hired out, as it was on the day we visited, so I only had a quick nose at it.  You can get married here, and if I lived closer to Bath I would have been very tempted to have had my wedding there!

Housed in this building is the Fashion Museum, which I really enjoyed.  I took quite a few pictures which hopefully you'll find interesting, I'll post them next time.