Monday, July 31, 2017

Farewell for now...

After much consideration, I have decided to shut down this blog and move all of my news and info to my website.

If you'd like to keep following me, please sign up for my newsletter on my website, or follow me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram.

Thanks for all your support over the past decade.

website:  www.meganwhitsonlee.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/meganwhitsonlee

Twitter: @MeganWhitsonLee

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/meganwlee1/

Thursday, July 6, 2017

Thursday Thoughts on Reading

Today I'm a guest blogger on Pamela S. Thibodeaux's site, Pam's Wild Rose Blog.

Check out my "Thursday Thoughts" on reading here.


Suburban Dangers is available in paperback or e-book on Amazon or wherever books are sold.

Tuesday, June 6, 2017

Tuesday Treasures Guest Blog

Today I am over on fellow Pelican Book Group author Pamela Thibodeaux's blog with a guest post on the things I treasure.


Stop by and say hi!


Link to blog

Monday, May 22, 2017

A Blog Visit and a Giveaway of Suburban Dangers

Marianne Evans is hosting me and highlighting Suburban Dangers over on her blog, A Minute with Marianne.




I'm also offering a giveaway of an e-book of Suburban Dangers. Head over to her blog to enter. She will announce the winner Friday, May 26th.

Here is what people are saying about Suburban Dangers:

"This book is a page-turner that defies a reader’s ability to stop once the book is begun. Lee is quickly becoming one of my go-to authors for a good read." —Edie Melson, author and blogger

"Megan Whitson Lee has written a book that should be on the “must read” list for all teens, boys and girls, as well as their parents and grandparents."--Amazon Review

"A fast paced, eye opening, well written novel, depicting a problem that may be closer to home than you think. When you start it you will have a hard time putting it down!"--Amazon Review

Friday, April 28, 2017

Regency Respite

I will be off the map and not blogging for several weeks while I endeavor to finish book two in my Regency series. Book one, Dangerous to Know, is slated for release sometime in the fall--a novel loosely based on the marriage of Byron and Annabella Milbanke. Book two will pick up where the first leaves off, so I'm endeavoring to construct that story now.

I'm very excited about this series, and where it's going, so I hope to have more news about it in the near future.

In the meantime, my new release Suburban Dangers (not a Regency, but contemporary women's fiction addressing teen sex trafficking) comes out May 12. It is currently available for pre-order. Also, today it's being featured on Elaine Stock's blog, Everyone's Story. You can also enter a giveaway for my novel, Captives. Winners will be announced this evening.




Until next time...





Friday, April 21, 2017

Anne Bronte: The Realist

I've never read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Or Agnes Grey. I've read Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights a million times, but nothing by the youngest Bronte sister. But I plan on rectifying the situation by putting both novels on my summer reading list. 

Anne Bronte was the youngest of the three and published her first novel, Agnes Grey, in 1847 at the same time her sisters published Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Over the years, neither of her books have received the same acclaim as either of her sisters, although later critics called her prose "perfect" and suggest that had she lived longer, she would have written a novel to surpass Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights.


(Anne Bronte, public domain)

All three of the girls were deeply affected by their brother Branwell's alcoholism. His slow death and degradation could not have been pretty. Long bouts of sickness followed him as well as debt and disgrace. When drunk (which was most of the time), he was demanding and abusive to his father and his sisters. The domestic violence of their household was no doubt the fodder for Anne's depiction of such matters in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Whereas Charlotte and Emily used their experiences with Branwell to spin more romanticized tales of wild love for a dark hero whose sins can and will be redeemed by the end of the story, Anne's view was much more realistic. Alcoholism was tragic, violence was ugly, and sometimes there were no happy endings. Charlotte Bronte's view was most likely tempered with a heavy helping of romanticism from her time in Brussels when she fell in love with a married man, and Emily may have drawn upon the notion that bad boys, like her brother, could be changed by love. 

Anne did not shy away from the stark and disturbing depiction of a woman shackled to a man in this state of degradation. Although The Tenant of Wildfell Hall was a commercial success, many criticized its blunt description and graphic storytelling about such matters. To this, Anne replied,


"...when we have to do with vice and vicious characters, I maintain it is better to depict them as they really are than as they would wish to appear. To represent a bad thing in its least offensive light, is doubtless the most agreeable course for a writer of fiction to pursue; but is it the most honest, or the safest? Is it better to reveal the snares and pitfalls of life to the young and thoughtless traveller, or to cover them with branches and flowers? O Reader! if there were less of this delicate concealment of facts–this whispering 'Peace, peace,' when there is no peace, there would be less of sin and misery to the young of both sexes who are left to wring their bitter knowledge from experience."*

I agree. This is profound wisdom. Although many of us prefer to read the romanticized version of the Byronic hero in Mr. Rochester and Heathcliff, the idea of saving a man fallen so far from grace has led many a woman down a thorny garden path and left her trodden in the mud.

Have you ever read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall or Agnes Grey?

  
*Quote from A Celebration of Women Writer's biography on Anne Bronte by Mary Mark Ockerbloom