HELEN RAPPAPORT
Helen Rappaport was born in Bromley and grew up by the Medway Estuary in North Kent. After leaving Chatham Grammar School for Girls she read Russian Special Studies at Leeds University. Having become involved in university theatre she decided against a career in the Foreign Office and became a professional actress, working in TV and films before moving to Oxfordshire in 1986.
Here Helen worked as a freelance copy editor for academic publishers Blackwell and OUP as well as London-based publishers; she also wrote biographical and historical entries for encyclopedias and part-works, before becoming a full-time writer in 1998. Her favourite historical period is 1837 to 1921: from the reign of Queen Victoria to the Russian Civil War - with specialisms in Victorian social and women’s history and the Russian Revolution. Helen is a fluent Russian speaker and has an abiding love of the language and its literature. She enjoys public speaking and broadcasting and recently undertook a lecture cruise on the Black Sea. She has appeared on Woman’s Hour, Start the Week, the Today Programme and Irish and Australian radio, as well as BBC national and regional TV news. In 2005 she was talking head on the Channel 4 documentary The Real Angel of the Crimea, about the Jamaican nurse Mary Seacole, and in 2010 for a programme about the Romanovs for National Geographic Channel.
She has maintained her passion for Russian, translating all seven Chekhov plays, working on new versions with leading British playwrights such as Tom Stoppard, David Hare and Nick Wright. In 2002 she was Russian consultant to the National Theatre production of Stoppards’ Coast of Utopia trilogy.
Helen lives in North Central Oxford. She is a member of the Society of Genealogists, The Society of Authors, The Victorian Society and the Biographers’ Club.
For more information visit www.helenrappaport.com
LATEST BOOK: BEAUTIFUL FOR EVER: MADAME RACHEL OF BOND STREET, COSMETICIAN, CON-ARTIST AND BLACKMAILER
Madame Rachel had everything a Mayfair address, the title of ‘purveyor to Her Majesty the Queen’, and a catalogue of exotic creams and potions. Her clientele were aristocratic, rich, and most importantly, gullible. They came in their droves to her shop in New Bond Street, lured by the promise of eternal beauty, but what they found there was something far darker – a con-woman and fraudster who made a career out of lies, treachery, and the false hopes of her victims.
Beautiful for Ever is the true story of a woman who found both fame and infamy peddling products which claimed almost magical powers of ‘restoration and preservation’.
From the mysterious origins of the woman known as Madame Rachel, through the teeming markets, filthy prisons and high society drawing rooms of Victorian London, it has all the elements of a thrillingly scandalous tale - blackmail, fraud, and high-profile trials; stolen names and false promises; love affairs, suicide and bankruptcy. And at the centre of it all, the domineering figure of Madame Rachel herself.
In its description of the growth of the Victorian cosmetics industry, the book presents fascinating parallels with the modern-day beauty business in this story of reinvention, transformation and the eternal quest of women to be Beautiful for Ever.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Memorial: The Death of Prince Albert (Hutchinson, 2011) (USA: St Martin’s Press, 2011),
dramatic rights sold to Parthenon Entertainment. Beautiful For Ever: Madame Rachel of Bond Street, Cosmetician, Con-artist and Blackmailer (Long Barn Books, March 2010),
Conspirator: Lenin in Exile (Hutchinson, 2009); (USA: Basic Books, 2010),
Ekaterinburg: The Last Days of the Romanovs (Hutchinson, 2008); (USA: St Martin’s Press, 2009). Foreign Editions in Brazil, Finland, Estonia and Portugal,
No Place for Ladies: The Untold Story of Women in the Crimean War (Aurum Press, 2007),
Queen Victoria: A Biographical Companion (ABC-Clio, 2003),
An Encyclopedia of Women Social Reformers (ABC-Clio, 2001),
Joseph Stalin: A Biographical Companion (ABC-Clio, 1999),
Dark Hearts of Chicago (Hutchinson, 2007) - a historical thriller co-written with William Horwood. A shortened version of this novel was published in paperback by Arrow (2008) as City of Dark Hearts under the pseudonym James Conan. Published under this pseudonym in Germany as Die Stadt der Dunken Herzen (Heyne Verlag, 2008) and in France as Dans L’Ombre de la Ville (France Loisirs, 2009).
