London, 1877.
Retired suffragists, VICTORIA WOODHULL and TENNESEE CLAFLIN
are shrewd, attractive, and looking for husbands. But their backgrounds are sketchy. No one knows they've been paid - some might say bribed - a fortune to leave New York. That they've been accused of intrigue, blackmail and worse are details best left alone. But when Victoria finds the love of her life, her prospects are threatened by a striking resemblance to a character in a story by Henry James.
Frantic to whitewash their past, she seeks Tennessee's help, unaware that Tennessee is in the midst of her own struggle, consumed by an illicit affair with a Duchess who is not only married, but is also mistress to the Prince of Wales.
Carrie Hayes was born in New York City. She grew up around journalists, idealists and rule breaking women. Find her on Medium.com, Substack.com and on her upcoming podcast, Angry Dead Women.
Carrie's debut novel, Naked Truth or Equality was an Editor's Choice in the Historical Novel Review.
The Midwest Review describes her latest book, Well Dressed Lies, as "an inviting novel of intrigue, mischief, and love that invites libraries and readers to partake of a story replete in changing alliances, closely-held secrets, and social change that romps through high society relationships on both sides of the pond."
Unraveling knots and constructing ideas about this book was a genuine puzzle. It took me about two chapters just to get into the idea of the book. Which is too long when you try to capture a reader’s attention.
“The conjugation of regular and irregular verbs in a Romance language goes a long way toward unraveling knots of anxiety in one’s mind. Remarkable, really, how one’s hesitations vanish when consumed with the construction necessary in composing ideas so that language functions not merely to communicate, but to perform. With style, as it were.”
The three different perspectives added to the reading challenge. I think if the author had written each chapter from a different point of view, it would have been an easier read. But, since it is a rapped change within one chapter, I could not enjoy the story as I would have liked.
I always love a good historical read with a woman finding her own voice in the mixture of plot and story. However, in Well dressed lies the plot was almost winded, and I was not sure what the purpose of the story was in the beginning.
The synopsis suggested about these two women, Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, have left New York under mysterious circumstances and settled in London. But this was vague, almost hidden within the voyage to Londen as people communicated with them or avoided them all together. Though they are charming, clever, and wealthy, the secrets and scandals were not clear either.
“As a family, we rarely discussed the fallout, what would happen, how it would look, what people would choose to believe. By the time we moved to London, it almost didn’t matter. There were few people who were privy to the truth of our actual, everyday lives. Those who didn’t know us assumed we were two foolish women, who blushed at nothing, prepared to knock over anything that stood in our path. But that was false. We were not that way at all.”
When Victoria falls in love with a man who resembles a character from a Henry James story, she fears that her identity will be exposed. She asks Tennessee for help, but Tennessee is too busy with her own troubles. She is having a forbidden affair with a married Duchess who is also involved with the Prince of Wales.
Tennie, or Tennessee, was the more approachable, more relatable of the three. But still hard to understand. She was floating around, unsure most of the time, with no definite purpose. Waiting on a man is not a purpose.
The third person in this book is Henry James, a man whose role within the story was unclear for quite a few chapters. He was shrouded in secrets himself and I found him an out-of-place sort of bloke. “WORDS: loquacious, garrulous, voluble, periphrastic, insidious, surreptitious IDEAS: a man bereft of ideas sets out to find the love letters of a long dead poet. She to whom the letters were written agrees to grant him access, upon one condition.”
This is how every section of his point of view began. A strange way of introducing an author, or was it an apt way of keeping the reader’s interest? I simply could not tell.
Overall, not a book that I would recommend. Thanks for the opportunity to read it though.
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