Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Amanda Foreman - Modern Library (1998)
When Keira Knightley deems your life worthy of big-screen portrayal, you know you’ve done something right. The Duchess, a 2008 film directed by Saul Dibb and starring the principle bodice-ripping actress of our time, is a delicious, intoxicating medley of heavy breathing and smoldering eye-contact. After all, how can sex not be central to the cinematic examination of a family whose illegitimate children outnumbered its legitimate ones? This film will certainly leave you in need of a cold shower, but does it add anything new to the established historical narrative? Although I would bury the costume designer in ribbons and awards, I’m not sure whether the focus of the film reflects the priorities of the book upon which it is based.
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire is a beautifully written glimpse into eighteenth-century English aristocratic society. Amanda Foreman, with her extensive collection of letters and private reflections, lays bare the touching, relatable, and often heartbreaking life of Lady Georgiana Spencer—the great-great-great-great aunt of Diana, Princess of Wales. But unlike the film it inspired, Foreman’s excellent biography does not exaggerate Georgiana’s scandalous love life at the expense of her other interests. In fact, if anything can be said to distract readers from Georgiana’s admirable political activism, it is her lifelong struggle with gambling addiction, which is painful and frustrating to read. At the end of the book—which coincides with the end of Georgiana’s life—the reader is left wondering what this extraordinary woman might have accomplished had she just been able to throw down her cards.
Anyone who has ever struggled with addiction will recognize this tortuous trajectory. What might seem like an obvious solution to any rational reader becomes an insurmountable obstacle to a woman whose life progressed along a shifting track of evolving bets and games. Georgiana lost her fortune, her husband, and her children because she could never break loose from her creditors. Foreman drags readers from one slip to the next, emphasizing how each of Georgiana’s compromises and justifications laid down precedents for the next. In this biography we can see the whole scope of a lifelong addiction—from the early days of doubt and remorse, to the later days when even the sacrifice of one’s children can be rationalized and digested. We sympathize with Georgiana, but we also want to seize her by the shoulders and shake her. As readers, we feel helpless because we are unable to show Georgiana that the various costs of addiction—financial, social, and psychological—obliterate the fleeting satisfaction of a gambling high. Foreman understands the efficacy of this frustration as a literary device. She understands that, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, readers will always hope for a happy ending. So we flip from disaster to disaster with an increasing sense of anxiety and a small, shameful nugget of hope. We are all—Georgiana included—trapped in an addictive loop of disappointment and desire. Foreman understands that the strength of these contradictory forces is potent fuel for any narrative and takes full advantage of the ping-pong dialectic between them.
Published in 1998, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire was Foreman’s first book, based on the doctoral thesis she wrote at Oxford. The book was an international bestseller and reached number one in the UK as a hardcover and paperback. It was shortlisted for the 1998 Guardian First Book Prize, and won the prestigious Whitbread Prize for Best Biography. In the years following its publication, Georgiana inspired a television documentary, a radio play featuring Judi Dench, and the aforementioned film starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes. Part of Foreman’s remarkable success is owed to her courageous attempt to rehabilitate a ‘fallen aristocrat.’ Every reader loves a scandal—especially when it involves outrageous fortunes and fancy inherited titles.
When the barriers of time and social protocol are set aside, Georgiana’s life story contains many of the same alluring components we find in modern tabloids. Comparing Georgiana’s complicated, adulterous family to the Kardashian family reveals the surprisingly consistent quality of celebrity culture. Whether we are talking about eighteenth-century lords and ladies, or twenty-first century social media gurus, the essential ingredients are the same: lots of money, public displays of social power, rivalries between warring aristocratic families, scandalous love affairs—especially within a single family—and an avid interest in pioneering new trends. We love to talk about these celebrities as though they are our intimate acquaintances. Now, trashy media vultures like Buzzfeed and E! feed our appetite for speculation, but eighteenth-century civilians were no more polite or respectful. Sir Joshua Reynolds, one of the leading Romantic painters and the first to understand the lucrative potential of public galleries, used to arrange his portraits in accordance with circulating gossip. If a certain lord was suspected of carrying on with a particular actress, their oil-painted eyes might meet across the gallery floor or their frozen hands might be separated by gilded frames and a few inches of wall.
Georgiana Spencer was thoroughly enmeshed in the invasive world of English aristocracy. From the moment she was ‘introduced’ to the moment she died, her every movement was magnified and analyzed by the lords and ladies she associated with. But Foreman is adamant in her belief that Georgiana was more than a victim of bored and bitchy females. She understood her power and limitations as a woman and made the most of her position. Writes Foreman,
She was the first woman to conduct a modern electoral campaign, going out into the streets to persuade ordinary people to vote for the Whigs. She took advantage of the country’s rapidly expanding newspaper trade to increase the popularity of the Whig party and succeeded in turning herself into a national celebrity. Georgiana was a patron of the arts, a novelist and writer, an amateur scientist and a musician. It was her tragedy that these successes were overshadowed by private and public misfortune…It would be foolish to separate Georgiana from her era and call her a woman before her time; she was distinctly of her time. Yet her successful entry into the male-dominated world of politics, her relationship with the press, her struggle with addiction, and her determination to forge her own identity make her equally relevant to the lives of contemporary women.
One of the crucial aspects of Foreman’s biography is that it strives to give its subject a voice that doesn’t reflect the motives of the writer. Lady Georgiana Spencer was a woman whose public image has been molded by both her contemporaries and modern historians to lend support to pre-established arguments. For feminists, she was a rebellious woman ground into submission by a domineering husband and an oppressive social regime. These scholars tend to ignore her desperate—often neurotic—need to feel loved by her mother, her parasitic friend Bess, and her cold, indifferent husband. They also downplay her gambling addiction and her abandonment of an illegitimate daughter fathered by Charles Grey. Political historians, on the other hand, tend to forget the restrictions placed upon eighteenth-century women altogether and lament her ‘meddling’ in politics. She has often been blamed with destroying the integrity of the Whig party by propositioning votes, throwing hedonistic all-night parties, and turning the serious field of English politics into a fashion show. Neither one of these dismissive reductions is accurate or fair. Foreman recognizes how easy it is for biographies to pick-and-choose evidence according to their personal beliefs, and she strives to be as objective as possible. In fact, Foreman urges her reader to think critically about the challenges facing a biographer in the very first paragraph of her book:
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.
Foreman is, of course, just as captivated as any other biographer. Nevertheless, I believe the evidence of her efforts to keep her distance can be seen in the development of her narrative. If Foreman was really in love with Lady Georgiana Spencer, the reader would conclude her book with a sense that the subject had learned from her mistakes and found a way to absolve her sins. This is not the case. By dispersing Georgiana’s intimate, anxiety-ridden letters throughout the narrative, Foreman underscores the fact that Georgiana’s life was defined by cycles of spontaneity, euphoria and remorse. If she learned any important lessons on her deathbed, it would be logical to conclude that these lessons would soon be forgotten if she somehow managed to recover. Foreman loves Georgina, but she does not see her subject as any kind of ideal. She is flawed, self-conscious, and lonely. Perhaps this why she is so easy to identify with. In fact, there are moments when Georgiana’s writing seems to be an eerie echo of my own internal dialogue. After her gambling debts led the Duke to banish her to France, Georgiana tried to convey her conflicting emotions to her strict, self-righteous mother:
I condemn myself as much almost for the misuse of time in my banishment, as anything else. I think I ought to have done so much better and the worst is that I have often given you cause of uneasiness and complaint, tho’ I would have sacrificed my life for your care and to do away the cruel blows I have given you. My mind and my heart always wish’d to do well, but despair at myself and my situation often depriv’d me of all energy and drew me into errors. Sometimes it was better, when I had hope I then could rouse myself, but at times I have sunk to a situation that made me fly to anything for resource.
The contrast between Georgiana’s private thoughts and her public persona is striking. Compare, for instance, the above confession with a description in the Morning Post:
The Duchess of D—e has a fashionable coat of mail; impregnable to the arrows of wit or ridicule; many other females of distinction have been made to moult, and rather than be laughed at any longer, left themselves featherless; while her Grace, with all the dignity of a young Duchess is determined to keep the field, for her feathers increase in enormity in proportion to the public intimations she receives of the absurdity.
From the age of sixteen, Georgiana was subjected to unceasing pressure to look and act a certain way. When she pushed these expectations to their ridiculous extremes—wearing enormous floppy hats or feathers on her head—she was seen as frivolous rather than subversive. Her comments on polite society were never taken ironically because she could not be separated from the culture she wished to critique. Only by comparing her own notes and letters with historical documentation can the full complexity of her life be understood. Writes Foreman,
…just as no painter ever captured a true likeness of Georgiana during her life, no obituary conveyed the true complexity of her character after her death…Throughout her adult life Georgiana struggled to reconcile the contradictions that enveloped her. She was an acknowledged beauty yet unappreciated by her husband, a popular leader of the ‘ton’ who saw through its hypocrisy, and a woman whom people loved who was yet so insecure in her ability to command love that she became dependent upon the suspect devotion of Lady Elizabeth Foster. She was a generous contributor to charitable causes who nevertheless stole from her friends, a writer who never published under her own name, a devoted mother who sacrificed one child to save the other three.
Georgiana Spencer was a flawed human being, just as we are all flawed human beings. If there is any lesson to be learned from Amanda Foreman’s emotionally-taxing and thoroughly researched biography, it is that even the paragons of fashion and high-culture are racked by doubts and insecurities. Once we chop away all the propaganda, all the offensive cartoons and vindictive gossip, Georgiana Spencer was just a woman who wanted to be loved and lacked the confidence to understand that she was. She was a woman who cared infinitely more about her mother’s opinions than she did about her shameful reputation as a whore and a crook. In Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, we see the vast gulf that can grow between private life and public performance when one’s every action is carefully monitored and critiqued. A person is forced to split into two isolated entities, one of which is completely ignored, while the other is rigidly restricted. It is after reading books such as this that I am very thankful to be relatively unknown and unimportant, free to fall apart, free to express my inappropriate emotions.
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