Books like Queen Bees by Siân Evans

Pride and Prejudice is a classic novel by Jane Austen.

Samuel Pepys (23 February 1633 – 26 May 1703) was an administrator of the navy of England and Member of Parliament. The detailed private diary that Pepys kept from 1660 until 1669 is one of the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period. It provides a combination of personal revelation and eyewitness accounts of great events, such as the Great Plague of London, the Second Dutch War, and the Great Fire of London. Pepys recorded his daily life for almost ten years. Pepys has been called the greatest diarist of all time due to his frankness in writing concerning his own weaknesses and the accuracy with which he records events of daily British life and major events in the 17th century. Pepys wrote about the contemporary court and theater, his household, and major political and social occurrences. Historians have been using his diary to gain greater insight and understanding of life in London in the 17th century. Pepys wrote consistently on subjects such as personal finances, the time he got up in the morning, the weather, and what he ate. He talked at length about his new watch which he was very proud of (and which had an alarm, a new thing at the time), a country visitor who did not enjoy his time in London because he felt that it was too crowded, and his cat waking him up at one in the morning. Pepys's diary is one of the only known sources which provides such length in details of everyday life of an upper-middle-class man during the seventeenth century. His diary reveals his jealousies, insecurities, trivial concerns, and his fractious relationship with his wife. It has been an important account of London in the 1660s. Aside from day-to-day activities, Pepys also commented on the significant and turbulent events of his nation. England was in disarray when he began writing his diary. Oliver Cromwell had died just a few years before, creating a period of civil unrest and a large power vacuum to be filled. Pepys had been a strong supporter of Cromwell, but he converted to the Royalist cause upon the Protector’s death. He was on the ship that brought Charles II home to England. He gave a firsthand account of events, such as the coronation of King Charles II and the Restoration of the British Monarchy to the throne, the Anglo-Dutch war, the Great Plague, and the Great Fire of London.

Henrietta Bennett, a Southern heiress, thrives as a jazz‑era socialite and publishing heir before her fierce lesbian romances provoke scandal and a life of addiction. Her story blends glamour, alcoholism, and LGBTQ history.

A sweeping social chronicle of the Chateau de l'Horizon near Cannes, tracing the glamorous lives and intrigues of France’s elite—from Coco Chanel’s 1920s Riviera revival to the passing of Prince Aly Khan in 1960.

"'I shall not be sorry when you come to keep the boys in order, for they have neither the respect of children, nor the good breeding of gentlemen, particularly Johnny, who talks of bad French novels and altogether wants repressing.' Thus Lady Stanley of Alderley wrote to her husband in 1852, highlighting some of the attitudes of the period. The lives of the children who lived in Britain's great country houses during the 19th century were a mixed scenario, including dysfunctional and remote families as well as close and loving ones. Drawing on diaries, letters, memoirs, and photo albums, Adeline Hartcup tells of nannies, tutors, and governesses, treats and punishments, and of ideas about God, death, and sex. She provides close-up portraits of five of thegreat families--Howards, Cecils, Russells, Lyttletons, and Gladstones--but also looks beyond the park gates, to the children who did not inherit the privileges that wealth and status conferred."--Pub. desc.

Samuel Pepys, a naval administrator and diarist, kept a private diary that captures the turbulent world of Restoration London and explores his inner life of relations with women, fears and ambitions, and political shifts.

Kathleen "Kick" Kennedy, the charismatic eldest daughter of President John F. Kennedy, traversed the social worlds of Britain and America, marrying her destiny amid glamour, tragedy and the weight of a famed family.

Lady Annabel Goldsmith is a daughter of the 8th Marquess of Londonderry. The family fortunes were based on coal-mining. In her enthralling memoir she told of her aristocratic upbringing with an increasingly eccentric father, a Conservative MP with strong liberal leanings.

"In The Long Weekend, acclaimed historian Adrian Tinniswood tells the story of the rise and fall of the English aristocracy through the rise and fall of the great country house. Historically, these massive houses had served as the administrative and social hubs of their communities, but the fallout from World War I had wrought seismic changes on the demographics of the English countryside. In addition to the vast loss of life among the landed class, those staffers who returned to the country estates from the European theater were often horribly maimed, or eager to pursue a life beyond their employers' grounds. New and old estateholders alike clung ever more desperately to the traditions of country living, even as the means to maintain them slipped away"-- "Drawing on thousands of memoirs, unpublished letters and diaries, and the eye-witness testimonies of belted earls and bibulous butlers, historian Adrian Tinniswood brings the stately homes of England to life as never before, opening the door onto a world half-remembered, glamorous, shameful at times, and forever wrapped in myth. The Long Weekend revels in the sheer variety of country house life: from King George V poring over his stamp collection at Sandringham to fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley collecting mistresses at ancestral homes across the nation, from Edward VIII entertaining Wallis Simpson at Fort Belvedere to the Duke of Marlborough at Blenheim, whose wife became obsessed with her pet spaniels. Tinniswood reveals what it was really like to live and work in some of the most beautiful houses the world has ever seen during the last great golden age of the English country home"--