Dark Aemilia - A Novel of Shakespeare's Dark Lady

Dark Aemilia - A Novel of Shakespeare's Dark Lady (#407) is loosely based on a real person; Aemilia Bassano, one of the first published female poets in the English language.  Sally O'Reilly says in her Historical Note at the conclusion of this dark, dark novel that Aemilia has been suggested by some scholars as a possible inspiration for Shakespeare's sonnets. 

In this imagining of her life, Aemilia is the much younger mistress of Henry Carey, the Earl of Hundsden and cousin to Elizabeth I.  She is quite content with her lot as a pampered courtesan with a place at Court until the fateful day when she meets William Shakespeare at a house party.   Their affair is a brief, bright but doomed comet.  When Aemilia finds herself pregnant, the Earl settles a house and its furnishings, a tidy sum of money and a compliant husband on her in time-honored fashion. At first Aemilia is able to live comfortably and dabble in writing her poetry, but after her husband races through her dowry and her affair with Shakespeare sours, Aemilia looks to the dark side of necromancy to improve her lot with consequences she could never have anticipated.

This is a fascinating glimpse of London life during the late Tudor period, but it is not for the faint of heart.  Londoners lived their daily lives surrounded by death both natural and state-mandated on a scale that we cannot even comprehend, and Ms. O'Reilly has certainly done her research to make the brooding atmosphere so palpable in Dark Aemilia.  Falling somewhere between the mysticism of the old Catholic religion and the astringent beliefs of the Protestants was an explosion of spells, charms, experiments and writings which some deemed science and others witchcraft, and it heavily influenced writers like Shakespeare and Aemilia Bassano Lanyer.  That becomes a key plot point in this page turner.

Ms. O'Reilly says she originally intended this novel to be about Lady Macbeth, but her research and her friends urged her to write something historical and dark.  I think she has succeeded admirably with Dark Aemilia.