England's Mistress

Author: Kate Williams
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307484297
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description
She was the most famous woman in England–the beautiful model for society painters Joshua Reynolds and George Romney, an icon of fashion, the wife of an ambassador, and the mistress of naval hero Horatio Nelson. But Emma Hamilton had been born to the poverty of a coal-mining town and spent her teenage years working as a prostitute. From the brothels of London to the glittering court of Naples and the pretentious country estate of the most powerful admiral in England, British debut historian Kate Williams captures the life of Emma Hamilton with all its glamour and heartbreak. In lucid, engaging prose, Williams brings to life a complex and intelligent woman. Emma is sensuous, generous, artistic, at once shamelessly seductive and recklessly ambitious. Willing to do anything for love and fame, she sets out to make herself a star–and she succeeds beyond even her wildest dreams. By the age of twenty-six, she leaves behind the precarious life of a courtesan to become Lady Hamilton, wife of Sir William Hamilton–the aging, besotted, and probably impotent British ambassador to the court of Naples. But everything changes when Lord Nelson steams into Naples harbor fresh from his triumph at the Battle of the Nile and literally falls into Emma’s adoring arms. Their all-consuming romance–conducted amid the bloody tumult of the Napoleonic Wars–makes Emma an international celebrity, especially when she returns to England pregnant with Nelson’s baby. With a novelist’s flair and an historian’s eye for detail, Williams conjures up the world that Emma Hamilton conquered by the sheer force of her charisma. All but inventing the art of publicity, Emma turned herself into a kind of flesh-and-blood goddess–celebrated by wits and artists, adored by thousands, and, for a time, very rich. Yet Emma was willing to throw it all away for the man she adored. After four years of archival research and making use of hundreds of previously undiscovered letters and documents, Kate Williams sets the record straight on one of the most fascinating and ravishing women in history. England’s Mistress captures the relentless drive, the innovative style, and the burning passion of a true heroine.

England's Mistress

Author: Kate Williams
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 456

Book Description
Sample Text

England's Mistress

Author: Kate Williams
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781408430774
Category : Ambassadors' spouses
Languages : en
Pages : 599

Book Description
The story of Emma Hamilton's rise, from prostitute to consort of the most famous man in England, has a contemporary ring of the self-made celebrity. Emma Hamilton was only twelve-years-old when she set off for London, initially as a domestic servant, before finding work as an actress's maid at Drury Lane. Within a short space of time, this indomitable young woman became the mistress of a leading aristocrat, the wife of another, the Lady Ambassadress to Naples, and the notorious lover of the most sought-after man in England, Horatio Nelson. In the days before photography, television and tabloid newspapers, Emma Hamilton would make astute use of art to promote an image of herself as an icon of fashion and beauty. The artist George Romney helped make her famous, producing hundreds of canvases devoted to the woman who was his perfect muse. However, it was her association with Nelson that brought Emma the kind of stardom we associate today with Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe. When she first met him -- the conquering hero of the Battle of the Nile -- he was a small man with only one arm, one eye and his front teeth missing. But he was to be the consuming passion of her life. "From the Hardcover edition."

Mistress Masham's Repose

Author: T H White
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1448173663
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
Ten-year-old orphan Maria lives in her ancestors' crumbling mansion, with warm-hearted Cook and the eccentric Professor as her only friends. Exploring the grounds one day, Maria discovers a wild, half-forgotten island in the middle of a neglected lake - and an extraordinary secret. For the island is home to a community of tiny people - the Lilliputians that Gulliver first met on his famous travels. But as Maria grows closer to her new friends, her own life is in grave danger. Her wicked governess and the cruel vicar are plotting to steal her rightful inheritance - and they will stop at nothing. How can Maria keep the Lilliputians safe, while protecting herself? A timeless classic from the author of The Sword in the Stone, with an introduction by Anne Fine.

Mistress of the Art of Death

Author: Ariana Franklin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101206756
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Book Description
The national bestselling hit hailed by the New York Times as a "vibrant medieval mystery...[it] outdoes the competition." In medieval Cambridge, England, Adelia, a female forensics expert, is summoned by King Henry II to investigate a series of gruesome murders that has wrongly implicated the Jewish population, yielding even more tragic results. As Adelia's investigation takes her behind the closed doors of the country's churches, the killer prepares to strike again.

The Case of Mistress Mary Hampson

Author: Jessica Malay
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804790604
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 177

Book Description
The centerpiece of The Case of Mistress Mary Hampson is the autobiographical narrative of a 17th-century woman in an abusive and violent marriage. Composed at a time when marital disharmony was in vogue with readers and publishers, it stands out from comparable works, usually single broadsheets. In her own words, Mary recounts various dramatic and stressful episodes from her decades-long marriage to Robert Hampson and her strategies for dealing with it. The harrowing tale contains scenes of physical abuse, mob violence, abandonment, flight, and destitution. It also shows moments of personal courage and interventions on the author's behalf by friends and strangers, some of whom are subject to severe reprisals. Mary wrote her story to come to terms with her situation, to justify her actions, and to cast herself in a virtuous light. The accompanying discussion of her life, drawn from other sources, provides chilling evidence of the vulnerability of seventeenth-century women and the flawed legal mechanisms that were supposed to protect them. Readers are also invited to consider in what ways the self-portrait is accurate and what elements of it may be considered fabrication. Malay's archival efforts have thus rescued a compelling and complicated voice from the past.

Mistress Bradstreet

Author: Charlotte Gordon
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316028681
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 263

Book Description
Though her work is a staple of anthologies of American poetry, Anne Bradstreet has never before been the subject of an accessible, full-scale biography for a general audience. Anne Bradstreet is known for her poem, To My Dear and Loving Husband, among others, and through John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. With her first collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America, she became the first published poet, male or female, of the New World. Many New England towns were founded and settled by Anne Bradstreet's family or their close associates -- characters who appear in these pages.

The Tudors: The King, the Queen, and the Mistress

Author: Anne Gracie
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416947787
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
The King and Cardinal both work for papal decree of divorce while the King becomes involved with another woman.

The Mistress Of Nothing

Author: Kate Pullinger
Publisher: Profile Books
ISBN: 1847652425
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Lady Duff Gordon is the toast of Victorian London. But when her debilitating tuberculosis means exile, she and her devoted lady's maid, Sally, set sail for Egypt. It is Sally who describes, with a mixture of wonder and trepidation, the odd ménage marshalled by the resourceful Omar, which travels down the Nile to a new life in Luxor. As Lady Duff Gordon undoes her stays and takes to native dress, throwing herself into weekly salons; language lessons; excursions to the tombs; Sally too adapts to a new world, affording her heady and heartfelt freedoms never known before. But freedom is a luxury that a maid can ill-afford, and when Sally grasps more than her status entitles her to, she is brutally reminded that she is mistress of nothing.

The Kings' Mistresses

Author: Elizabeth C Goldsmith
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1586488902
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

Book Description
The Mancini Sisters, Marie and Hortense, were born in Rome, brought to the court of Louis XIV of France, and strategically married off by their uncle, Cardinal Mazarin, to secure his political power base. Such was the life of many young women of the age: they had no independent status under the law and were entirely a part of their husband's property once married. Marie and Hortense, however, had other ambitions in mind altogether. Miserable in their marriages and determined to live independently, they abandoned their husbands in secret and began lives of extraordinary daring on the run and in the public eye. The beguiling sisters quickly won the affections of noblemen and kings alike. Their flight became popular fodder for salon conversation and tabloids, and was closely followed by seventeenth-century European society. The Countess of Grignan remarked that they were traveling "like two heroines out of a novel." Others gossiped that they "were roaming the countryside in pursuit of wandering lovers. "Their scandalous behavior -- disguising themselves as men, gambling, and publicly disputing with their husbands -- served as more than just entertainment. It sparked discussions across Europe concerning the legal rights of husbands over their wives. Elizabeth Goldsmith's vibrant biography of the Mancini sisters -- drawn from personal papers of the players involved and the tabloids of the time -- illuminates the lives of two pioneering free spirits who were feminists long before the word existed.