Cure your winter blues with this fascinating turn-of-the-century story wrought with passion and scandal. Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age is a New York Times Bestselling novel which partially takes place right here at Castle Hill, where Amélie lived as a child and then became an owner in adulthood.
The Package Includes:
(1) Signed Copy* of Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age
(1) Bottle Sunday Muse Port Cider
Virtual book club discussion on March 11th at 7pm EST with Author Donna M. Lucey to discuss the book, and a tasting of Sunday Muse with our Cider Maker, Don Whitaker.
$75 / package
*First 20 packages sold will feature signed copies of the book.
CLICK HERE to purchase the Book Club Package.
About the Book
Amélie Rives was an inhabitant of Castle Hill estate. She was also a novelist, and authored at least three novels drawing on her life in Virginia. By most accounts, her work was considered risqué and as such, was an alarming success, with her first novel The Quick or the Dead selling over 300,000 copies. Amelie married John Armstrong “Archie” Chanler, great-great grandson of John Jacob Astor - and heir to his fortune.
Filled with glamour, mystery, and madness, Archie and Amélie is the true story chronicling a tumultuous love affair in the Gilded Age.
"As compelling as a smoldering historical novel … Passion, marriage, and scandal … all against a glittery backdrop of New York mansions, Boston town houses, and Parisian hotels."
—Boston Globe
About Donna M. Lucey, Author
Donna is an award-winning author and scholar who loves to rummage in dusty archives and attics seeking out untold stories about women. Her latest book, Sargent’s Women: Four Lives Behind the Canvas (W. W. Norton, 2017), chronicles the lives of four women painted by the iconic, high-society portraitist John Singer Sargent. The book won a 2019 Victorian Society in America Book Award, the 2018 Art in Literature: The Mary Lynn Kotz Award, and was a Finalist for Best work of Non-Fiction Library of Virginia Literary Award. Reviewed widely, the book was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection. Donna has received two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities as an independent scholar and was a 2017 writer-in-residence at Edith Wharton’s The Mount.
Her previous works include the New York Times bestseller Archie and Amélie: Love and Madness in the Gilded Age (2006); I Dwell in Possibility: Women Build a Nation, 1600 to 1920 (2001) and the award-winning Photographing Montana 1894–1928: The Life and Work of Evelyn Cameron (1990).