Greetings,
everyone. Jack Caldwell here. I’d like to thank Maria Grazia for the opportunity to
visit with you today to talk about my latest book, PERSUADED TO SAIL: asequel to Persuasion and Book Three of Jane Austen’s Fighting Men.
PERSUADED TO SAIL picks up at the end of Persuasion—the
wedding of Anne Elliot to Captain Frederick Wentworth. Planning an uneventful
honeymoon cruise aboard HMS Laconia to Frederick’s posting in Bermuda,
the Wentworths’ plans are thrown into disarray by the Hundred Days Crisis.
Hold on a second. What is the Hundred Days
Crisis?
To explain
this, I have to go back to the genesis of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815).
This era of conflict arose out of the Wars of the French Revolution
(1792-1802). Europe had been locked in a bloody conflict between the homicidal
French Republic and the autocratic European monarchies. The chaos allowed a
little-known general from the French island of Corsica, Napoleon Bonaparte,
to prove his military prowess, to seize power in a coup d'état, and then
smash the Coalition armies and force a peace. Peace only lasted a year, and a
third coalition of European powers was formed in 1803 to fight the self-styled
Emperor Napoleon.
