Courtesans!
Sep. 7th, 2010 09:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marinessMy Lady Scandalous: the Amazing Life and Outrageous Times of Grace Dalrymple Eliot, by Jo Manning.
Grace Dalrymple (1754?-1823) married young, to John Elliott, a doctor many years her senior. The marriage was a disaster; Eliot produced quite convincing and extensive evidence that his wife had cheated on him (and he himself seems to have not been a particularly faithful sort; his will lists several illegitimate children), and received a very public and flamboyant divorce through Parliament – the only way to get a divorce in those good old 18th century days. (Lesser, poorer families simply separated, with less legal justification; divorce was expensive.)
Left to her own devices, Grace Elliott became, in one of the delightful terms of the time, a Bird of Paradise – trading in her beauty and sexual favors for money, housing and some quite luxurious extras. The word prostitute was never quite used, but she could certainly be termed – as her biographer does – a courtesan, taking some high class lovers indeed. (Although Jo Manning doesn't mention it, I have a sense that the story of Grace Elliott's liaison with Lord Cholmondeley, especially his family connection with Horace Walpole, may have formed part of the inspiration for Georgette Heyer's The Convenient Marriage.) And so, she might have passed into a footnote of history, only studied by social historians interested in the history of marriage and divorce, except for one small note: one of her lovers was Philippe, Duc de Orleans, also known as Egalite, one of the central figures of the French Revolution.
Grace Elliott spent the French Revolution in Belgium and France, occasionally passing messages back and forth between English politicians and French noblemen (despite her unconventional status, she knew Marie Antoinette personally), hiding the occasional French refugee, and spending, by her account, months in a revolutionary jail, awaiting execution, saved at the last minute, like the future Empress Josephine only by the death of Robespierre and the end of the Terror. She later wrote a dramatic memoir of the Revolution, the accuracy of which has been severely disputed.
Outside of this memoir, however, very little is known of her life, other than what can be gleaned from the scandal sheets of the day – which is sort of equivalent to attempting to create a serious, thorough and unbiased biography about Angelina Jolie from the pages of US Weekly, except, harder. Unknown things include: when Grace Elliott was born (she had a tendency to lie about her age), how many children she had, who fathered her children, who she actually slept with, what her eye color was, how many siblings she had, what she was doing at multiple times, and so on. Her letters have mostly vanished; her few descendants – a daughter and a granddaughter who was by all appearances a pillar of Victorian respectability - were not exactly eager to preserve mementoes of the family disgrace.
Jo Manning is not attempting to write a serious scholarly biography here: she admits that she was inspired to investigate Grace Elliott's life after seeing a movie about her, and the lavishly illustrated, frequently chatty book is aimed at a general, not scholarly audience. And even there, the book more than occasionally slips up.
Given the sketchiness of the available information, even the most scholarly biographer would be compelled to fill in the gaps with information about "the times." This Jo Manning does here with a vengeance, giving us highly opinionated tidbits about such things as Hamlet ("the pig"), the various other people in Grace Elliott's life, condoms, Horace Walpole, balloons, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Prince Harry and Prince William, portraits, divorce laws, pornographic art and so on. Most of this is wildly entertaining if (especially the parts about Prince Harry and Prince William) wildly off topic and occasionally (especially the parts about Prince Harry and Hamlet) mildly libelous. Manning also frequently and cheerfully quotes extensively from various fictional sources, most notably 20th century historical novels, but sometimes Dickens, to, as she explains, give the atmosphere, which is all nice, if it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in her research.
Errors abound. At one point, Russell blithely tells us that younger sons of Earls are termed Honorables, not Lords, a particularly strange error given that she correctly titles, on that same page, a younger son of an Earl as Lord. The Duchess of Devonshire was a Georgiana Spencer, not a Diana Spencer; the two earlier Diana Spencers were Lady Diana Spencer Russell, Duchess of Portland (not Devonshire), not mentioned in this book, and the considerably more notorious Lady Diana Spencer, later Lady Diana Beauclerk, an artist and illustrator better known for her own scandalous divorce. Marie Antoinette was almost certainly suffering from tuberculosis and probable untreated uterine cancer, not menstruation, when she made her way to the guillotine. And so on.
The narrative falls apart right after discussing Grace Elliott's divorce, meandering here and there and everywhere, never telling us (and perhaps trying to conceal ignorance of) the timeline of just what happened after that traumatic event. A couple of the illustrations are just baffling – what, for instance, is a nice Holbein painting of some unknown Tudor lady doing in this book? Is it meant to illustrate the extent of someone's art collection? Or just thrown in to fill up space?
And the biography inexplicably spends comparatively little time on the one well documented (and most interesting) period of Grace Elliott's life: her participation in the French Revolution. This was the bit that the 2001 film L'Anglaise et le Duc (whichcoldecho and I found moderately boring) chose to focus on, and rightly: however coloured her memoirs, this was the center event of Elliott's life and that of many others, and an examination of her memoirs, and the political motivations behind them (Elliott did not pretend to be penning an unbiased account, and frankly stated that she was attempting to defend various figures of the Revolution, particularly the Duc d'Orleans/Egalite, while letting people know that Lafayette, whatever Americans might think of him, royally sucked) could have been fascinating.
As it is, this is an amusing, light read; I just wish someone had fact checked it, reconsidered some of the illustrations, and asked the biographer to do a bit more research on Elliott's tales of the French Revolution.
(Elliott's own memoirs are available here for free. Warning: much of it is probably not true, but it's a fairly fast read.
Grace Dalrymple (1754?-1823) married young, to John Elliott, a doctor many years her senior. The marriage was a disaster; Eliot produced quite convincing and extensive evidence that his wife had cheated on him (and he himself seems to have not been a particularly faithful sort; his will lists several illegitimate children), and received a very public and flamboyant divorce through Parliament – the only way to get a divorce in those good old 18th century days. (Lesser, poorer families simply separated, with less legal justification; divorce was expensive.)
Left to her own devices, Grace Elliott became, in one of the delightful terms of the time, a Bird of Paradise – trading in her beauty and sexual favors for money, housing and some quite luxurious extras. The word prostitute was never quite used, but she could certainly be termed – as her biographer does – a courtesan, taking some high class lovers indeed. (Although Jo Manning doesn't mention it, I have a sense that the story of Grace Elliott's liaison with Lord Cholmondeley, especially his family connection with Horace Walpole, may have formed part of the inspiration for Georgette Heyer's The Convenient Marriage.) And so, she might have passed into a footnote of history, only studied by social historians interested in the history of marriage and divorce, except for one small note: one of her lovers was Philippe, Duc de Orleans, also known as Egalite, one of the central figures of the French Revolution.
Grace Elliott spent the French Revolution in Belgium and France, occasionally passing messages back and forth between English politicians and French noblemen (despite her unconventional status, she knew Marie Antoinette personally), hiding the occasional French refugee, and spending, by her account, months in a revolutionary jail, awaiting execution, saved at the last minute, like the future Empress Josephine only by the death of Robespierre and the end of the Terror. She later wrote a dramatic memoir of the Revolution, the accuracy of which has been severely disputed.
Outside of this memoir, however, very little is known of her life, other than what can be gleaned from the scandal sheets of the day – which is sort of equivalent to attempting to create a serious, thorough and unbiased biography about Angelina Jolie from the pages of US Weekly, except, harder. Unknown things include: when Grace Elliott was born (she had a tendency to lie about her age), how many children she had, who fathered her children, who she actually slept with, what her eye color was, how many siblings she had, what she was doing at multiple times, and so on. Her letters have mostly vanished; her few descendants – a daughter and a granddaughter who was by all appearances a pillar of Victorian respectability - were not exactly eager to preserve mementoes of the family disgrace.
Jo Manning is not attempting to write a serious scholarly biography here: she admits that she was inspired to investigate Grace Elliott's life after seeing a movie about her, and the lavishly illustrated, frequently chatty book is aimed at a general, not scholarly audience. And even there, the book more than occasionally slips up.
Given the sketchiness of the available information, even the most scholarly biographer would be compelled to fill in the gaps with information about "the times." This Jo Manning does here with a vengeance, giving us highly opinionated tidbits about such things as Hamlet ("the pig"), the various other people in Grace Elliott's life, condoms, Horace Walpole, balloons, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Prince Harry and Prince William, portraits, divorce laws, pornographic art and so on. Most of this is wildly entertaining if (especially the parts about Prince Harry and Prince William) wildly off topic and occasionally (especially the parts about Prince Harry and Hamlet) mildly libelous. Manning also frequently and cheerfully quotes extensively from various fictional sources, most notably 20th century historical novels, but sometimes Dickens, to, as she explains, give the atmosphere, which is all nice, if it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in her research.
Errors abound. At one point, Russell blithely tells us that younger sons of Earls are termed Honorables, not Lords, a particularly strange error given that she correctly titles, on that same page, a younger son of an Earl as Lord. The Duchess of Devonshire was a Georgiana Spencer, not a Diana Spencer; the two earlier Diana Spencers were Lady Diana Spencer Russell, Duchess of Portland (not Devonshire), not mentioned in this book, and the considerably more notorious Lady Diana Spencer, later Lady Diana Beauclerk, an artist and illustrator better known for her own scandalous divorce. Marie Antoinette was almost certainly suffering from tuberculosis and probable untreated uterine cancer, not menstruation, when she made her way to the guillotine. And so on.
The narrative falls apart right after discussing Grace Elliott's divorce, meandering here and there and everywhere, never telling us (and perhaps trying to conceal ignorance of) the timeline of just what happened after that traumatic event. A couple of the illustrations are just baffling – what, for instance, is a nice Holbein painting of some unknown Tudor lady doing in this book? Is it meant to illustrate the extent of someone's art collection? Or just thrown in to fill up space?
And the biography inexplicably spends comparatively little time on the one well documented (and most interesting) period of Grace Elliott's life: her participation in the French Revolution. This was the bit that the 2001 film L'Anglaise et le Duc (which
coldecho and I found moderately boring) chose to focus on, and rightly: however coloured her memoirs, this was the center event of Elliott's life and that of many others, and an examination of her memoirs, and the political motivations behind them (Elliott did not pretend to be penning an unbiased account, and frankly stated that she was attempting to defend various figures of the Revolution, particularly the Duc d'Orleans/Egalite, while letting people know that Lafayette, whatever Americans might think of him, royally sucked) could have been fascinating.As it is, this is an amusing, light read; I just wish someone had fact checked it, reconsidered some of the illustrations, and asked the biographer to do a bit more research on Elliott's tales of the French Revolution.
(Elliott's own memoirs are available here for free. Warning: much of it is probably not true, but it's a fairly fast read.