Belle Brezing made a major career move when she stepped off the
streets of Lexington, Kentucky, and into Jennie Hill's bawdy house
-- an upscale brothel run out of a former residence of Mary Todd
Lincoln. At nineteen, Brezing was already infamous as a youth
steeped in death, sex, drugs, and scandal. But it was in Miss
Hill's "respectable" establishment that she began to acquire the
skills, manners, and business contacts that allowed her to ascend
to power and influence as an internationally known madam.
In this revealing book, Maryjean Wall offers a tantalizing true
story of vice and power in the Gilded Age South, as told through
the life and times of the notorious Miss Belle. After years on the
streets and working for Hill, Belle Brezing borrowed enough money
to set up her own establishment -- her wealth and fame growing
alongside the booming popularity of horse racing. Soon, her houses
were known internationally, and powerful patrons from the
industrial cities of the Northeast courted her in the lavish
parlors of her gilt-and-mirror mansion.
Secrecy was a moral code in the sequestered demimonde of
prostitution in Victorian America, so little has been written about
the Southern madam credited with inspiring the character Belle
Watling in Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. Following
Brezing from her birth amid the ruins of the Civil War to the
height of her scarlet fame and beyond, Wall uses her story to
explore a wider world of sex, business, politics, and power. The
result is a scintillating tale that is as enthralling as any
fiction.
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