Amber

Abandoned pregnant and penniless on the teeming streets of London, 16-year-old Amber St. Clare manages, by using her wits, beauty, and courage, to climb to the highest position a woman could achieve in Restoration England—that of favorite mistress of the Merry Monarch, Charles II. From whores and highwaymen to courtiers and noblemen, from events such as the Great Plague and the Fire of London to the intimate passions of ordinary—and extraordinary—men and women, Amber experiences it all. But throughout her trials and escapades, she remains, in her heart, true to the one man she really loves, the one man she can never have. Frequently compared to Gone with the Wind, Forever Amber is the other great historical romance, outselling every other American novel of the 1940s—despite being banned in Boston for its sheer sexiness. 

http://www.burtonbookreview.com/2012/04/forever-amber-by-kathleen-winsor.html

Astonishingly, Kathleen Winsor was an American from the Midwest who had never been to London and had recreated the panorama of Restoration England from heroic research. Her first husband, Robert Herwig, whom she married as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley, had done his senior thesis on Charles II, and for five years, while he was away serving as a marine lieutenant, she studied the period, read 392 books, and wrote six drafts of her novel, running to almost 13,000 pages. The book itself is 972 pages long. 

 "Marygreen did not change in sixteen years. It had changed little enough in the past two hundred.

The church of St. Catherine stood at the northern end of the road, like a benevolent godfather, and from it the houses ran down either side—half-timbered cottages, with overhanging upper stories, and thatched with heather or with straw that had been golden when new, then had turned slowly to a rich brown, and now was emerald green with moss and lichen. Tiny dormer windows looked out, wreathed with honeysuckle and ivy. Thick untrimmed hedges fenced the houses off from the road and there were small wooden gates, some of them spanned by arches of climbing roses. Above the hedges could be seen the confusion of blooming flowers, delphinium and lilacs, both purple and white, hollyhocks that reached almost to the eaves, an apple or plum or cherry tree in full blossom." 

Among the many historical figures who appear in the novel are Charles's mistress, Barbara Villiers, the countess of Castlemaine; Samuel Pepys; the painter Sir Peter Lely; the Earl of Rochester, and Nell Gwynne.

Forever Amber is a 1947 American romantic drama film starring Linda Darnell and Cornel Wilde

                        http://www.allmovie.com/movie/v92092

King Charles II: [at a royal ball] Look at them. My loving subjects. You'd never know that half of them danced in Puritan garb while my father went to the chopping block.

British School 17th century - Portrait of a Lady, Called Elizabeth, Lady Tanfield

 "Her honey-coloured hair fell in heavy waves below her shoulders and as she stared up at him her eyes, clear, speckled amber, seemed to tilt at the corners; her brows were black and swept up in arcs, and she had thick black lashes. There was about her a kind of warm luxuriance, something immediately suggestive to the men of pleasurable fulfillment—something for which she was not responsible but of which she was acutely conscious. It was that, more than her beauty, which the other girls resented."