📚 Tale Teller Club Press (TTCP)

Welcome to the History of True Love Romance at Mills and Swoon. Tonight’s story takes us to the turbulent years of the French Revolution and the rise of a man who would one day rule much of Europe. Yet long before Napoleon Bonaparte became an emperor, he was simply a young officer hopelessly in love. The woman who captured his heart was Joséphine de Beauharnais. Joséphine was not the obvious match for a rising military man. She was older than Napoleon by six years, a widow with two children, and already well known in Parisian society for her charm and elegance. During the violent years of the Revolution she had narrowly escaped execution after her first husband was sent to the guillotine. By the time she met Napoleon in 1795, she had learned how fragile fortune could be. Napoleon, by contrast, was intense, ambitious, and still relatively unknown. He was brilliant on the battlefield but socially awkward, prone to sudden bursts of emotion and fierce devotion. When they met in Paris, he f...

Welcome to the History of True Love Romance at Mills and Swoon. The Letters That Became a Love Story: Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning In the middle of the nineteenth century, when England still believed that respectable women should remain quietly indoors and poets were expected to suffer nobly in obscurity, a love story began with a letter. Elizabeth Barrett was already a celebrated poet by the time Robert Browning first wrote to her in 1845. She was also chronically ill, deeply sheltered, and living under the suffocating authority of a domineering father who forbade his children to marry. From her room in Wimpole Street she lived a life that was intellectually rich but physically constrained, surrounded by books, manuscripts, and the protective concern of family members who feared that even mild excitement might worsen her fragile health. Robert Browning was very different. Younger, energetic, and not yet widely recognised, he admired Elizabeth’s poetry intensely. After reading...