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Madam Belle: Sex, Money, and Influence in a Southern Brothel (Topics In Kentucky History)

Amazon.com Price:  $16.96 (as of 06/05/2019 12:44 PST- Details)

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Description

Belle Brezing made an enormous career move when she stepped off the streets of Lexington, Kentucky, and into Jennie Hill’s bawdy house―an upscale brothel run out of a former place of dwelling of Mary Todd Lincoln. At nineteen, Brezing was once already infamous as a youth steeped in death, sex, drugs, and scandal. Nevertheless it was once in Miss Hill’s “respectable” establishment that she started to acquire the skills, manners, and business contacts that allowed her to ascend to power and influence as an the world over known madam.

In this revealing book, Maryjean Wall offers a tantalizing true story of vice and power in the Gilded Age South, as told through the life and times of the notorious Miss Belle. After years at the streets and working for Hill, Belle Brezing borrowed enough money to set up her own establishment―her wealth and fame growing alongside the booming popularity of horse racing. Soon, her houses were known the world over, and powerful patrons from the industrial cities of the Northeast courted her in the lavish parlors of her gilt-and-mirror mansion.

Secrecy was once a moral code in the sequestered demimonde of prostitution in Victorian The us, so little has been written about the Southern madam credited with inspiring the character Belle Watling in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Following Brezing from her birth amid the ruins of the Civil War to the height of her scarlet fame and beyond, Wall uses her story to explore a much wider world of sex, business, politics, and power. The result is a scintillating tale that may be as enthralling as any fiction.

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