Welcome to The Darling Academy! This is a lifestyle website for housewives, homemakers & traditionalists. A place to embrace your love for home, and your role in it.
My name is Alena Kate Pettitt, I am an English author who is passionate about family values, keeping traditions alive, and good old fashioned manners.
After some exhausting adventures during my twenties, in particular working in London in the cut-throat and fast paced beauty industry, I finally came home to the Cotswolds, got married and started a family.
An early mid-life crisis of confidence left me shattered emotionally and wondering why the world, despite all its opportunity made me feel so unsatisfied with my life, and how my supposed “modern and empowering” choices had destroyed my self-esteem.
My first book, Ladies Like Us documents my rise to grace, and how I learned to love myself and my feminine identity - I wanted to share this journey in order to help other women experiencing the same feelings.
After requests for more on the subject of a return to (or learning to live by) traditional values, my second book English Etiquette was released in the Spring of 2019, which is a modern field guide to good manners, and family life with a time-honoured spin.
In January 2020 I made worldwide news as a “Traditional Wife”, a curious individual who chooses to take care of her family over having a “career”, and this raised the #ApronCladArmy. You can see more about that here.
When I’m not doing the laundry, drinking tea, or cooking something from scratch, you’ll likely find me here writing about traditional living, tending the vegetable patch, or stalking the royal family.
We have recently moved to my husband’s home country of Australia, and I’m learning to marry my love for English living, and making this gorgeous new landscape “home”.
I’d love to invite you to join our community. It’ll help you stay up to date with my articles, it’s easy, completely free, and simple to do, just subscribe here. Our encouraging, uplifting, and practical advice articles will be sent directly to your inbox as soon as they’re published!
