Lillie Langtry: Manners, Masks and Morals - Tapa dura

"The most original and penetrating book on Mrs. Langtry that has been written... fresh and revealing." - "Literary Review""Beatty writes with wit and gusto--The tone of her book - racy, sharp-witted and elegantly aphoristic - is nicely appropriate to its subject matter." - "Sunday Times""From the Trade Paperback edition."

Lillie Langtry - 'Jersey Lillie' - born, a provincial in 1853, was catapulted by her beauty into the highest society London had to offer. Surrounded by scandal, luxary and gossip, she bacame the mistress of the Prince of Wales, the goddess of Bohemia and the protegée of Oscar Wilde. After four years, she disappeared, bankcrupt, and pregnant with an illegitimate child.

When she resurfaced, guided by Wilde, it was with the masks of several new and invented selves for protection. This book attempts to unravel her complex fictions about herself, to find the person behind the actress, gambler and iconoclast that she then became. At its centre are the previously unpublished letters which she wrote to her childhood friend and secret lover, Arthur Jones, during her period of crisis and collapse. Despairing, fervent and pathetically dependent, these letters reveal a passionate woman for whom the usual charges of coldness and opportunism are by no means the whole story. She died, broken in spirit but world-famous and a millionaire, in 1929.

Laura Beatty captures exactly the spirit of the age, and lifts the masks to reveal the real Lillie.