Napoleon's Rosebud

By: Humphry Knipe

Narrated by: Mary Jane Wells

Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

You are the high spirited 19-year-old daughter of a penniless widow, born and brought up on an isolated, windswept South Atlantic island, a girl with virtually no prospects, when out of the blue the most famous man on earth falls into your lap.

Still smarting from his defeat at Waterloo, still the hero of Liberals everywhere, Napoleon has been exiled to tiny Saint Helena, because it is the remotest and most easily defended island in the British Empire. But far from being broken by defeat, Napoleon’s fertile imagination seethes with escape schemes. He meets you on his first evening on the island and instantly knows he has found what he is looking for: someone to set him free.

Nicknaming you "Rosebud", he sends you to Europe with a secret message for Lord Byron, an ardent supporter. You escape the notorious poet’s clutches just in time to get involved in a madcap scheme to rescue Napoleon by submarine, a new-fangled American invention. Then, you return home to give him his final victory.

This clandestine affair between an imprisoned emperor and the island girl who tries to set him free has a very personal backstory, writes the author. When he was a child back home in South Africa his grandfather, who emigrated from Saint Helena in the late 1880s, often spoke about his family’s acquaintance with the great man. A big print of Napoleon hung on his living room wall. "Remember that we have been touched by greatness," were his enigmatic last words.

When he researched this claim many years later and discovered the Rosebud legend he realized why his grandfather, a Victorian gentleman, hadn’t gone into detail. Charlotte Knipe, said to be the most beautiful girl on Saint Helena at the time, is on record as having been a frequent guest of the emperor and rumored to have been his lover. Rosebud is the author’s great-great-grandaunt. The "touch of greatness" was Napoleon’s.

©2017 Humphry Knipe (P)2019 Haaren Enterprises

Attention fans of OUTLANDER!

Attention fans of OUTLANDER! Welcome to your next, hot historical drama. This story is wild. It also happens to be inspired by the author's family history. And it's a DOOZY.  Napoleon (yes, that Napoleon) has been exiled to the tiny island of Saint Helena where he meets the gorgeous, 19-year-old daughter of a widow struggling to make ends meet. What follows is a wild adventure complete with secret identities, love affairs and a submarine. (Did you know the submarine was invented in 1620? I didn't.) The audio version is read by the delightful Mary Jane Wells. Highly recommend this one for the crosstown commute! 

Great book, Great Performance

I read a lot, mostly non-fiction, mostly history, screenplays, and poetry. I don't read a lot of novels. But I read everything Mr. Knipe writes in whatever genre or form, and it seems like he does it all.

Admittedly, I know him. But I know him because he's a great writer, and it's my business to know great writers. He does his research, he works like an ox, and edits with a clear head and humility; he rewrites and rewrites, polishing every word and paragraph. He seeks to educate and entertain and always does both with the soul of a poet. There is real history in this book, which one might assume to be the author's fantasy, if you didn't know better.

Besides research and craft, there is psychological insight into these historical characters' souls. I feel like I know Napoleon, now, something I never felt before from school, movies, or other books.

Napoleon's Rosebud, disguised perhaps as a bodice-ripping sex farce, is an enlightening work about power, politics, sex and the nexus between them. Now, I know what it feels like to be the most powerful man in the world, defeated, sequestered in a God-forsaken place, plotting my return to power, using everyone and everything at my disposal to fulfill my megalomaniacal ambitions; and I know what it feels like to be a young provincial woman, the belle of the local ball, seduced by an older man of, fame, discipline, brilliance, and authority.

It's light of tone but dense of detail with hints of deeper meanings and shades of modern resonance, as if to say that these events 200 hundred years ago on a tiny, underpopulated island as far from our world as you could get, then or now, are relevant to the burning issues of 2020. (Is Donald Trump the Napoleon of today? There are vast differences between the two men but some key similarities, i.e. reluctance to accept defeat.)

This audio version by the award--winning, classically-trained actor Mary Jane Wells evokes and exudes gravitas, dignity, pathos, mischief, coquettishness, raw masculinity, military honor, pomposity, obsequiousness, superiority, terror, deceit-- intermittently, appropriately, brilliantly--in the multiple characters she essays, acting out every part as great story tellers do.