Biographers are notorious for falling in love with their subjects. It is the literary equivalent of the 'Stockholm Syndrome', the phenomenon which leads hostages to feel sympathetic towards their captors. The biographer is, in a sense, a willing hostage, held captive for so long that he becomes hopelessly enthralled.
There are obvious, intellectual motives which drive a writer to spend years, and sometimes decades, researching the life of a person long vanished, but they often mask a less clear although equally powerful compulsion: Most biographers identify with their subjects. It can be unconscious and no more substantial than a shadow flitting across the page. At other times identification plays so central a role that the work becomes part autobiography as, famously, in Richard Holmes's Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1995).
Beautiful, glamorous and charismatic, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was an icon of her age; she was also a compulsive gambler, an influential political operator, a drug addict, a doting mother and an adulteress.
In a world of decadence and excess, of great houses, extravagant parties and sexual intrigue, Georgiana, like her descendant, Diana, Princess of Wales, was publicly adored but personally troubled. From her complex menage a trois with her husband and best friend to her vast gambling debts; from her adoration of her children to her passionate but doomed love for Earl Grey, she was a fascinating, contradictory woman whose story still resonates today.
INTRODUCTION
PART ONE: DEBUTANTE
Debutante: 1757-1774
Fashion's Favourite: 1774-1776
The Vortex of Dissipation: 1776-1778
A Popular Patriot: 1778-1781
Introduction to Politics: 1780-1782
PART TWO: POLITICS
The Cuckoo Bird: 1782-1783
An Unstable Coalition: 1783
A Birth and a Death: 1783-1784
The Westminster Election: 1784
Opposition: 1784-1786
Queen Bess: 1787
Menage a Trois: 1788
The Regency Crisis: 1788-1789
PART THREE: EXILE
The Approaching Storm: 1789-1790
Exposure: 179o-1791
Exile: 1791-1793
Return: 1794-1796
Interlude: 1796
Isolation: 1796-1799
PART FOUR: GEORGIANA REDUX
Georgiana Redux: 1800-1801
Peacel 1801-1802
Power Struggles: 1802-1803
The Doyenne of the Whig Party:. 1803-1804
The Ministry of AU the Talents': 1804-1806
Epilogue
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
