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| One Month Season 1 Countdown From 2022 |
But I decided to put one up anyway.
The countdown is how much longer until Season 2 of Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches premieres on AMC. It premieres on January 5, 2025.
I haven't spent much time talking about the series in the last few months because I've been preoccupied with technical details. And I do mean technical. Hopefully, the result is all things are functional with nothing functioning in the background that I don't know about. It's rude.
What I want to focus on now is the pages of the Mayfair Witches Parlor that discuss the AMC series. You can find them from here, Chronicles of the Mayfair Wtiches, by scrolling to Mayfair Witches From Page to Screen. The image there, the one of Rowan becoming entangled in the rose vines as if they're reaching out from the wallpaper to entangle her, is one of the promotional images from Season 1. It's also one of my favorites because it really does illustrate the way the legacy of the Mayfair Witches ensnares Rowan.
It has been nearly 30 years since I first read these novels, and they left a lasting impression me for several reasons. The TV series is obviously very new and very recent in this timeline. It is also being released in a time very different than the ones the books were first published in. One of the first things that jumped out at me was the confusion over the Garden District house used as the Mayfair Witches house in the novels versus the TV series. To me, it's basic knowledge that Anne Rice used her own then-home, the Brevard-Rice house at 1239 First Street in New Orleans, as the house Rowan Mayfair inherited from her mother, Deirdre, that she and Michael Curry restore and live in. When Season 1 first premiered, people commented that the house used in the show, the Soria-Creel house, sure looked like Anne Rice's former home.
Yes, there are several houses in the Garden District that are built like American townhouses with Greek Revival-Italianate architecture. Of course, they have the iconic iron lace the porches and galleries of New Orleans are famous for. Each has its own style, its own colors, and even the basic layouts have their own unique differences. Depending on where they are, many of the houses have grounds of different sizes.
In the case of the Brevard-Rice house, one of the features that is fairly unique to it is the fact that the columns along the front of the house are of different styles. I'll have to go back and check, but I did read once that when the house was being built, Albert Brevard wanted those particular styles of columns because he liked both styles. Therefore, he decided the columns along the front of his new home would feature both styles. The end result was, of course, that there are three different styles.
Another architectural tidbit about 1239 First Street is that the library and master bedroom were added later. Elizabeth Brevard sold the house to Emory Clapp in or about 1869, ten years after her father's death. It was Emory Clapp who hired the original architects, James Calrow and Charles Pride, to add the library and master bedroom. Clapp died in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1880. Of what, I've not been able to find out, but it's possible he died of tuberculosis, as Colorado Springs was known for its tuberculosis sanitariums beginning around that period. Emory Clapp and his wife, who remained in the house until her death in 1934, are entombed in Metairie Cemetery, which is where Anne Rice is entombed with her husband and daughter.
If you look at a 1990 first edition hard cover print of The Witching Hour, look at the title pages. You will see a sketch of the house, which is very clearly the house Anne Rice owned and lived in, 1239 First Street in New Orleans. The Trade paperback edition of the novel was released in November 1991 and has the same sketch. I have a Trade paperback copy of the novel from that time with the sketch in it. The Mass Market edition of the novel was released in May 1993 and features the house on its cover with the lightning around it.
If that doesn't settle the question of whether or not Anne Rice used her own home as the setting of the Mayfair house that Rowan inherited in her novels, I don't know what will.
Speaking of the novel versus the screen, I began a list of comparisons between specific things in the TV series that were different than the novels. That list should be on the page of the Parlor that is linked on the page you can find this blog on. I know--CONFUSING. It's hard to rebuild a site like mine on today's tools if you're not a business.
Anyway.
I'd intended to rewatch Season 1 so I could complete my list of comparisons. Christmas is pretty quiet around here, so why not hole up and binge watch...something? At least, until it's time for the yearly marathon of A Christmas Story...
