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Harriette Wilson's Memoirs: The Memoirs of the Reigning Courtesan of Regency London
 
 
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Harriette Wilson's Memoirs: The Memoirs of the Reigning Courtesan of Regency London (Paperback)

by Harriette Wilson (Author), Lesley Blanch (Editor) "THE NINETEENTH CENTURY was an age of great personalities, a last splendid flowering before twentieth-century anonymity and mass living engulfed them in its drab tide..." (more)
3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 528 pages
  • Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; New edition edition (9 Jan 2003)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1842126326
  • ISBN-13: 978-1842126325
  • Product Dimensions: 20.8 x 14.2 x 4.3 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 596,138 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

Nineteenth century London produced a fine flowering of eccentrics and individualists. Chief among them was Harriette Wilson, whose patrons included most of the distinguished men of the day, from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Byron. She held court in a box at the opera, attended by statesmen, poets, national heroes, aristocrats, members of the beau monde, and students who hoped to be immortalised by her glance. She wrote these memoirs in middle age, when she had fallen out of favour. She advised her former lovers that for 200 she would edit them out. 'Publish and be damned!' retorted the Duke of Wellington. The result is an elegant, zestful, unrepentant memoir, which offers intimately detailed portraits of the Regency demimonde. First published in 1957.

From the Back Cover

Harriette Wilson's Memoirs These are the memoirs of the reigning courtesan of Regency London whose patrons included most of the distinguished men of her day, from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Byron. Hard-pressed for money in middle age, she sold her memoirs after offering to edit out any lovers who paid her the sum of 200 Publish and be damned! cried the Duke of Wellington. She did and she was. Edited and Introduced by Lesley Blanch, author of The Wilder Shores of Love.
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THE NINETEENTH CENTURY was an age of great personalities, a last splendid flowering before twentieth-century anonymity and mass living engulfed them in its drab tide. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Harriette's personal story, 16 Oct 2003
By A Customer
The introduction to the memoires gives a good overall picture of Regency life and the place of the courtesan. This is nothing however compared to the actual memoires - they are revealing, enjoyable, and rather like reading a Regency issue of a 'Hello' type magazine. Harriette is very open, rather sweet and at times just a little too humble. She paints a picture of the courtesan life which shows just how open their role was, and yet how much they lived in a parallel world to that of the real Regency folk of the Ton.
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1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars An Engaging Regency Trollop, 17 Oct 2005
By microfiche (Scarborough, ON Canada) - See all my reviews
I think this is the book Thackery's Becky Sharpe would have written if she was not a fictional character. The differences between her society (and century) and ours makes her prose a little hard to follow - and you know you can't believe all she wrote. I think she didn't expect her readers to swallow it whole because 1)who would but the book if there was ho hum and little scandal in it? and 2)she was trying to extort hush money so she had to write something worth hushing up.
But she's so breezily brazen that, like Becky, you turn the page to find out if she wins or loses.
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3.0 out of 5 stars Amusing memoirs; dated introduction, 16 Nov 2009
By Mrs. Gillian M. Othen "gillmaryo" (Britain) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
Harriette Wilson is notoriously the woman of pleasure who blackmailed her former lovers - if they paid up they avoided detailed mention in her memoirs. The Duke of Wellington had no truck with this - his memorable response, "Publish and be damned!" is nowadays more famous than the book and woman who inspired it.

This edition was published and edited in the late fifties and it shows. The lengthy introduction reveals quite a moralistic attitude, with no consideration of the sort a modern feminist might give, of the world of women "of that kind" and the options available to them. It also takes for granted a rather more detailed knowledge of French courtesans like La Paiva and Edwardian demi-reps than is actually likely today.

Harriette's memoirs are lively and clearly utterly unreliable, but enormous fun for anyone who knows their way round the history and literature of the period or, for that matter, is a Georgette Heyer fan! My advice is to skip the introduction and dive straight into the world of this silly, outrageous "Tart with a heart" of two centuries ago, which, as another reviewer says, could almost be culled from the pages of a modern celebrity scandal magazine.
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