Improper Pursuits
The Scandalous Life of an Earlier Lady Diana Spencer
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
With these words to Boswell, Samuel Johnson dismissed Lady Di Beauclerk, the wife of one of his closest friends, a woman of the highest rank, the daughter of a duke, who had forsaken her reputation, her place in society, her children, and her role as lady-in-waiting to the Queen for love.
Born Lady Diana Spencer in 1735, the eldest child of the third Duke of Marlborough, she was expected rigidly to follow a traditional path through life: educated in the fashion considered suitable for a girl, and married to a man of the appropriate rank for a duke's daughter. But finding herself in a desperately unhappy marriage to Viscount Bolingbroke, Lady Di overturned convention. She left her husband, maintained a secret relationship with her lover, Topham Beauclerk, hid the birth of an illegitimate child, and eventually helped to support herself by painting.
Lady Di Beauclerk was a highly gifted artist who was able to use her scandalous reputation as an adulteress, aristocratic woman to further her career as a painter and designer. She painted portraits, illustrated plays and books, provided designs for Wedgwood's innovative pottery, and decorated rooms with murals. Championed by her close friend Horace Walpole, whose letters illuminate all aspects of her life, she was able to establish herself as an admired artist at a time when women struggled to forge careers.
Carola Hicks provides an enthralling account of eighteenth-century society, in which Lady Di encountered many of the most eminent artistic, literary, and political figures of the day. Improper Pursuits is an absorbing study of a singular life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Anyone looking for a frothy read won't find it here; though there is scandal in the life of Lady Diana Spencer Bolingbroke Beauclerk, Hicks buries it in a flood of historical detail. The first Diana Spencer (1735 1808) served as a Lady of the Bedchamber in the court of George III until she got pregnant during an adulterous affair. Even more scandalous, her oldest Bolingbroke son left his wife after embarking on an incestuous affair with her oldest Beauclerk daughter; the couple had three children and escaped to Paris. But there was a more serious, substantive side to Lady Di's life. Her second husband ran with an artistic crowd that included James Boswell, Samuel Johnson and Joshua Reynolds; she herself was a glamorous painter who did design work for Josiah Wedgwood and endeared herself to Horace Walpole, whose unrequited love for her made him her greatest champion. It's great raw material, but Hicks, who teaches art history at Cambridge University, gives equal weight to all her facts, and so her narrative falters. Readers must slog through minutiae about 18th-century painting supplies and obstetrical practices, condoms (they were made of linen and came in three different sizes) and rouge ingredients. The resulting book is likely to weary anybody but serious history buffs. 8 pages of b&w and 8 pages of color photos not seen by PW.