A historical novel
Based on the true story behind the Spirit of Ecstasy
The woman behind the Spirit of Ecstasy. A real life hidden inside a famous machine.
You have seen her ten thousand times. You have never once known her name. She leans from the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce ever built. The world calls her the Spirit of Ecstasy. Her name was Eleanor.
North Star Publishing Group
Trade and library orders through IngramSpark. A public storefront URL will be added here when it is live.
The book
Arms swept back, robes streaming, riding a wind that is not there. For more than a century she has travelled at the head of the most famous motor cars ever made. A private emblem of secrecy, recast as a commercial emblem of prestige.
Eleanor Velasco Thornton was loved in secret for fifteen years by a man who was not free to love her. On a bright afternoon at the end of December 1915, the sea took her. She has no grave. She has, instead, four inches of silver on the front of more motor cars than anyone alive can count.
I
Before Rolls-Royce had an emblem, Lord Montagu had one of his own. He commissioned it from the sculptor Charles Sykes, and Eleanor sat for it: a small silver woman leaning into the wind with one finger laid across her lips. Hush. Say nothing. He drove his secret through London in plain sight, and not one person who saw it understood what they were looking at.
II
He was a motoring pioneer, a member of parliament, a married man. She was a telegraph engineer’s daughter from Stockwell who had built herself, name and all, out of nothing. “I fell in love with her at first sight,” he wrote. “But as I couldn’t marry her I felt I must keep away from her as much as I could.” He could not.
III
She wrote to his wife and gave away her own seat in the lifeboat, so that he could never overrule it. “The lord will have an extra chance, for there will be my place in the boat for him, even if he has to be stunned to take it.” He lived. Thirty hours in the water. She was forty years old, and she had four minutes.
Read it
For readers of The Paris Wife and The Aviator’s Wife.
The author
Margot Dorée has spent her life at the meeting point of beauty and machinery: on the stages and runways of Europe, and, to the surprise of those who know only the couture side of her, in a garage full of Corvettes. The roar of a big engine is, to her ear, simply another form of elegance. It was that double life, the gown and the grille, that drew her to the woman behind the most famous ornament ever bolted to a car.
The Woman on the Bonnet is her first novel, published by North Star Publishing Group.
Also coming
Expected September 2026. The same author, the same kind of story. Elfi Arkus-Duntov and the making of a machine. Retailer links when that title is live.
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