Madam Belle

Sex, Money, and Influence in a Southern Brothel

By: Maryjean Wall

Narrated by: Caroline Shively

Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins

Publisher's summary

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 19, 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 audiobook, 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.

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.

©2014 The University Press of Kentucky (P)2015 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

" Madam Belle contributes new information and historical context to one of America's most famous, or infamous, madams." ( Lexington Herald-Leader)

"Wall's captivating study of Kentucky's most famous madam will take readers back to a lively time in Lexington's history. A biography of Belle Breezing was long overdue, and this is a good one." (Jamie Nicholson, author of The Kentucky Derby)

Disappointing

If I wanted to know about Belle Brezing, I should have read the other book this one kept referencing. This book opened by telling us there wasn't enough information any Belle to fill a proper book so the author was going to talk about other things.... I should have stopped there. Seems the author wanted to make a few buck on her own speculation about the connection to Belle Watling of "Gone with the Wind" . She should have spent more time on that contrast and compare, rather than waste my time on horse racing history. Skip this one and read "Madam" by Libby Hawker instead.

Disappointing

There was too many tangents in the book. I learned more about horseracing than I did about Madame Belle. There’s probably two hours of information on Madame Belle. The rest is information about horse racing horse culture and the political climate of the time.

I didn't want a book on horses and racing

I stopped listening about 3/4 of the way. There was very little information on Belle. Most of the book that I read was on the history of horse breeding and horse racing near her brothel. Perhaps this tied in to the last part of the book I didn't read. If so it took a long time to get there.

All over the place, although great historical fact

The author had great facts but jumbled the book from one era to another, more of a tidbit book than an autobiography and the narrator had no consistency