The Duchess. Amanda Foreman

rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">⁴³ Like his contemporaries at Eton and later at Brooks’s she had fallen under Fox’s spell. His following in parliament depended as much on his personality as on his views. To be a Foxite meant that one belonged to a gang whose single bond was an uncritical admiration of Fox.

      Fox and Mary’s belief in Georgiana persuaded her that she could make something more of herself. In April 1778 she wrote of her desire to begin afresh. ‘I have the strongest sense of having many things to repent of and my heart is fully determined to mend,’ she told Lady Spencer; she planned to take Holy Communion (a rite less commonly performed in the eighteenth century) after her trip to Derby. But the same letter also hints at entanglements – gambling debts – which she regretted and feared. ‘By going there I break off many unpleasant embarrassments I am in with regard to others and the quiet life I shall lead there will give me time to think …’⁴⁴

The result was a thinly disguised autobiographical novel called The Sylph. Notwithstanding its exaggerations, the book can be read as a roman à clef. Written as a series of letters, the story follows the misadventures of Julia Stanley, a naive country girl married to the dissipated Sir William Stanley, a rake whose only interests are fashion and gambling. When Julia first comes to London she does not understand the ways of the ton, but slowly it seduces her and she becomes trapped. She learns how to live à la mode, how to spend hours dressing for a ball, how to talk, sing, dance and think like a fashionable person. She realizes that her soul is being corrupted by the cynicism and heartlessness which pervades the ton, but sees no hope of escape. Sir William is cruel, even brutal towards her. His only concern is that she should be a credit to him in public. He flaunts his mistress in front of her, punishes her when she suffers a miscarriage, and is not above assaulting her when angered. As his creditors close in, Sir William forces Julia to sign over all her personal property. (Nor is she the only woman in the book to suffer from male abuse. An aristocratic lady who loses a fortune at the gaming table is blackmailed by a friend into sleeping with him in return for his silence.)^* Julia’s friend Lady Besford, who is obviously modelled on Lady Melbourne, urges her to accept her life and find happiness where she can. Julia is facing moral ruin when an anonymous protector, calling himself ‘the Sylph’, begins sending her letters of advice. Finally Sir William becomes so desperate for money that he sells the rights to Julia’s body to his chief creditor. She runs away, and he shoots himself in a shabby room above an inn.^† The Sylph then reveals himself to be Julia’s childhood sweetheart. They marry and live happily ever after.

      Georgiana wrote The Sylph in secret and published it anonymously as ‘a young lady’.⁴⁵ The novel was a creditable success, quickly going through four editions; it was not long before people guessed the identity of the author. When challenged in public Georgiana refused to comment, but it became common knowledge that she had admitted the truth in private. There were plenty of clues pointing in her direction, not only in her choice of names, which are all variations on those of her friends, but in the sly references to herself: Julia’s hairdresser protests that ‘he had run the risk of disobliging the Duchess of D—, by giving me the preference of the finest bunch of radishes that had yet come over from Paris’. Like Georgiana, Julia has a younger sister whom she adores and a worldly, older female companion to whom she turns for advice. The similarities in style and phrasing between the novel and Georgiana’s letters allayed any lingering doubts. Georgiana often wrote of her longing for a moral guide: ‘Few can boast like me of having such a friend and finding her in a mother,’ she once wrote to Lady Spencer, adding how much she depended on her for moral and spiritual advice. ‘I should be very happy if I could borrow some friendly Sylph (if any are so kind as to hover about Hardwick) and a pair of wings that I might Pay you now and then a visit.’⁴⁶

      Part of The Sylph’s success was due to its notoriety. Readers were shocked by the sexual licence and violence it depicted. The Gentleman’s Magazine was appalled: the anonymous female author, it thought, showed ‘too great a knowledge of the ton, and of the worst, though perhaps highest part of the world’. Mrs Thrale, doyenne of the Blue Stocking Circle, denounced the book as ‘an obscene Novel’.⁴⁷ She objected to passages such as the following, where Lady Besford expresses a breathtakingly cynical view of marriage:

      you do not suppose my happiness proceeds from my being married, any further than that I enjoy title, rank and liberty, by bearing Lord Besford’s name. We do not disagree because we seldom meet. He pursues his pleasure one way, I seek mine another, and our dispositions being opposite, they are sure never to interfere with each other … My Lord kept a mistress from the moment of his marriage. What law excludes a woman from doing the same? Marriage now is a necessary kind of barter, and an alliance of families; – the heart is not consulted …

      The Sylph touches on many subjects, not least the loneliness of a bad marriage and the vulnerability of women in a society where they are deprived of equal rights. Georgiana obviously wrote the novel in a hurry and it does not compare well with Fanny Burney’s Evelina, for example. The significance of The Sylph lies in the rare insider’s glimpse it provides of the ton. Georgiana describes a competitive, unfriendly world peopled predominantly by opportunists, liars and bullies; a world which encourages hypocrisy and values pretence. The irony did not escape her that even as she hated it she was also its creature. However, in publishing The Sylph she was also claiming her independence.

*Georgiana was not herself a snob. When Monsieur Tessier, the celebrated French actor, visited England the Duchess of Manchester refused to speak to him because he earned his living. Her behaviour disgusted Georgiana, and to make the point she danced with him at Almack’s.

* Sheridan’s friend and biographer Thomas Moore remembered his hatred of perceived rivals: ‘It was Burke chiefly that S. hated and envied (they indeed hated each other) – Being both Irishmen – both adventurers – they had every possible incentive to envy.’ Wilfrid S. Dowden, ed., The Journal of Thomas Moore (London 1983), I, p. 161.

* Hare’s seat in parliament – courtesy of the Duke – was the only barrier between him and debtors’ prison. He was fortunate enough to be the grandson of a bishop, but also unfortunate in being the son of an apothecary. He had gambled away his small inheritance and thereafter survived as a permanent house guest in Whig society. He was stick thin, with a face so white he appeared more dead than alive.

* Apparently the Queen’s brother-in-law surprised them one day while they were making up after an argument, hugging each other tightly and kissing each other’s tear-stained cheeks. He burst out laughing and left, saying, ‘Pray don’t let me disturb you!’ and told everybody how he had interrupted the two friends.

* Fox even brought a few of his friends to near bankruptcy by persuading them to provide security for him in the form of annuities to money-lenders. At one point the Earl of Carlisle was paying one sixth of his income towards the interest on Fox’s debts. Leslie Mitchell, Charles James Fox (Oxford 1991), p. 102.

† Contemporary descriptions show how peculiar this uniform was: ‘The gamesters began by pulling off their embroidered clothes, and putting on frieze greatcoats, or turned their coats inside outwards for good luck. They put on pieces of leather (such as are worn by footmen when they clean knives) to save their laced ruffles; to shield their eyes from