Kathleen Winsor and Forever Amber Part I

Kathleen Winsor - famous as the author of Forever Amber - was born in Minnesota in 1919. Her father was a real estate dealer and she went to college. She married young, to a football star, Robert Herwig, and during her marriage to him, she worked as a sports reporter for a newspaper. Herwig was at college, and Kathleen, bored one day, picked up one of his books about Restoration England. She became interested in the period, and began to research it. Herwig was soon away at World War II. During that time, Kathleen continued to read about Charles II’s England.. Reputedly, she read over 300 books on the era…though she had never travelled outside the USA. She had always wanted to write, and during her husband’s absence, she wrote several drafts of the novel Amber.. It was a long book and packed with incident. She was working on it, soon after the runaway success of Gone with the Wind. Mitchell’s novel was probably an inspiration.. it also had a historical background, was set during torrid times of war and disaster and had a feisty independent glamorous heroine. Amber is much more scandalous than Scarlett O’Hara...and rises from poverty to affluence and high status, mainly by the use of sex. She becomes eventually the mistress of Charles II. Scarlett, on the other hand, is never very sexual. She does fascinate men, and is willing to flirt to get ahead, but never goes further than that. In fact, she is almost frigid until Rhett forces her to have sex and it excites her. She makes her way in the world through business smarts, willingness to work hard and being good with handling money. (She does marry three times but the sexual side of the marriages is not important to her). Amber is the illegitimate daughter of Royalist gentry, but her parents had died. She was fostered by a decent but not very rich farming family. She meets Bruce Carlton, when she is 16. Her beauty attracts Bruce, a Royalist lord who is trying to rebuild his life after the Civil Wars. He seduces her and takes her with him to London, but he dislikes court life and wants to go adventuring abroad… Amber, however, is fascinated by the world of the rich, and London. Some of the novel was clearly inspired by Moll Flanders, by Defoe. Bruce goes away, leaving her with some money, and leaving her pregnant. She foolishly marries a con man, to get a father for her unborn baby. Her husband cheats her out of the money Bruce left her, and she ends up in jail. She becomes a thief and the mistress of a thief… She becomes an actress and then marries a well to do elderly businessman.