Princess Louise of England was the sixth child and fourth daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Like her siblings, Louise married well, wedding the Duke of Argyll in 1871. Unlike her siblings, Louise had no children. Was her husband homosexual? Was Louise left sterile by a rumored abortion in her "wild" youth? In The Wild Princess, Mary Hart Perry melds fiction with history to explore one possible, if imagined, answer to these questions.
Perry portrays Louise as married to a man she barely knows, whose sexual preferences leave him utterly unwilling to have children with her. Mourning the loss of the children that will never be, Louise throws herself into her art, charity work and the women's suffrage movement. She assumes she'll learn to live without romance or adventure, but she does not count on two things--the machinations of the Fenian movement for Irish independence and the protection of a dashing U.S. Civil War veteran named Stephen Byrne.
The Wild Princess is a wild ride, artfully told and overflowing with lavish Victorian detail. Perry's Louise is equal parts fearless and vulnerable, admirable but also approachable. Perry walks the line between fact and invention with ease, weaving a fictional tale that nevertheless feels real. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at The Book Cricket