Introducing The Hearth & Violet Quarterly

The Hearth and Violet Quarterly

A Letter to Our Esteemed Readers, from the Editor’s Chair

Dearest Readers,

Permit me to welcome you—gently and most sincerely—to The Hearth & Violet Quarterly, a publication dedicated to matters both delicate and enduring: love and longing, domestic quietude, curious tales, and the subtle wildness of a woman’s inner world.

Though you hold this missive (or perhaps scroll it) in modern hands, I invite you to imagine, if only for a moment, that you are seated beside a low fire in a dim drawing room. A pot of tea steams on the sideboard. The scent of pressed violets lingers on the air. Outside, the wind murmurs something forgotten. Inside, we speak in confidences.

This Quarterly was born from a desire for stories whispered rather than shouted, for rooms lit by candle rather than gaslight, for heroines whose courage blooms not in battlefields but in parlors, gardens, and letters never sent. It is for the wistful, the inquisitive, the secretly bold.

Within these pages (and those to come), you may expect:

• Interviews from drawing rooms and distant halls, where characters real and imagined reveal their hearts with candor and grace.

Here are two I've conducted already: A conversation with Miss Annabelle Greystone and an intimate conversation with the newly betrothed Lord Nigel Ashcombe and Miss Mary Smith.

• Serialized tales of romance and spectral wonder, penned for fireside reading and soft sighs.

• Notes on tea, lace, flowers, dreams, and women who feel deeply—whether in 1857 or 2025.

• And from time to time, letters like this one—from your faithful contributor and editor-in-chief, Miss Lavinia Forsythe, who, though admittedly fictional, has a most sincere regard for your companionship.

Whether you have wandered here by chance or by longing, know this: you are most welcome.

May you find in The Hearth & Violet a gentle home for your imagination, a place where stories breathe and love lingers in the quiet corners. For what is romance, if not a candle held steady in the draft?

Editor’s Note:

I am most pleased to share that The Hearth & Violet Quarterly has found a kindred spirit across the sea. From a porch fringed in southern wisteria and stories older than the hills,  The Wisteria Almanack is lovingly compiled by Miss Sybil Whitlow—poetess, chronicler of weather and women, and my dearest correspondent in the American South.

Where we sip tea by gaslight, Miss Whitlow pours strong coffee by oil lamp. Where we sketch society in lace, she listens for truth in the wind and writes it down in the margins of her almanack. Her pages bloom with folklore, frontier letters, and the hush of haunted places—tales not shouted but kept, like pressed blossoms in a prayer book. Those inclined to read by firelight and feeling will find a second home there, as I have.

Yours by lamplight,

Miss Lavinia Forsythe

Editor-in-Chief

The Hearth & Violet Quarterly