| Harriette Wilson's Memoirs: The Memoirs of the Reigning Courtesan of Regency London |  | Author: Harriette Wilson
Creator: Lesley Blanch
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Category: Book
Buy New: £27.09 (EUR39.77)
as of 31/7/2010 13:40 IST details
New (2) Used (5) from £2.88 (EUR4.23)
Seller: thebookcommunity
Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 490,763
Media: Paperback
Edition: New edition
Pages: 528
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.3
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.7
ISBN: 1842126326
Dewey Decimal Number: 920
EAN: 9781842126325
ASIN: 1842126326
Publication Date: January 9, 2003
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Amusing memoirs; dated introduction November 16, 2009
Mrs. Gillian M. Othen (Britain)
Harriette Wilson is notoriously the woman of pleasure who blackmailed her former lovers - if they paid up they avoided detailed mention in her memoirs. The Duke of Wellington had no truck with this - his memorable response, "Publish and be damned!" is nowadays more famous than the book and woman who inspired it.
This edition was published and edited in the late fifties and it shows. The lengthy introduction reveals quite a moralistic attitude, with no consideration of the sort a modern feminist might give, of the world of women "of that kind" and the options available to them. It also takes for granted a rather more detailed knowledge of French courtesans like La Paiva and Edwardian demi-reps than is actually likely today.
Harriette's memoirs are lively and clearly utterly unreliable, but enormous fun for anyone who knows their way round the history and literature of the period or, for that matter, is a Georgette Heyer fan! My advice is to skip the introduction and dive straight into the world of this silly, outrageous "Tart with a heart" of two centuries ago, which, as another reviewer says, could almost be culled from the pages of a modern celebrity scandal magazine.
An Engaging Regency Trollop October 17, 2005
microfiche (Scarborough, ON Canada)
1 out of 4 found this review helpful
I think this is the book Thackery's Becky Sharpe would have written if she was not a fictional character. The differences between her society (and century) and ours makes her prose a little hard to follow - and you know you can't believe all she wrote. I think she didn't expect her readers to swallow it whole because 1)who would but the book if there was ho hum and little scandal in it? and 2)she was trying to extort hush money so she had to write something worth hushing up.
But she's so breezily brazen that, like Becky, you turn the page to find out if she wins or loses.
 Harriette's personal story October 16, 2003
8 out of 9 found this review helpful
The introduction to the memoires gives a good overall picture of Regency life and the place of the courtesan. This is nothing however compared to the actual memoires - they are revealing, enjoyable, and rather like reading a Regency issue of a 'Hello' type magazine. Harriette is very open, rather sweet and at times just a little too humble. She paints a picture of the courtesan life which shows just how open their role was, and yet how much they lived in a parallel world to that of the real Regency folk of the Ton.
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