Elizabeth and Georgiana

I saw the film Duchess recently while on holiday. The film, much like every film about real people, got me thinking about the people in it. What were they really like? Did things really happen the way they did in the film?

I had an inkling that the film may not have been completely truthful as I remembered my mother talking about The Duchess of Devonshire, but like so many things a mother tells her children this piece of very useful information had passed me happily by. What I did remember however was that she had a book about the Duchess. It turned out she had two. One about Georgiana, The duchess of Devonshire and another about Elizabeth, the third party in the ménage a trois, which included the two aforementioned ladies and William Cavendish, the 5^th Duke of Devonshire.

Much as I had suspected the film had little to do with real life. And even after reading the two books much is still unknown about the famous (or infamous) trio. What I did discover was that Georgiana was a fascinating woman who was not only the absolute fashion icon of her time but also an influential figure of the political world in a time when women weren’t allowed to vote. She was also a manic gambler with debts that in current money equal millions of pounds. In the film she was in an unhappy marriage and jealous of her husband’s lover, her own friend Elizabeth. In real life it seems she didn’t mind the relationship between the Duke and Elizabeth that much – at least they were great friends all the time they knew each other.

Now in Amanda Foreman’s book Georgiana, The Duchess of Devonshire it is clear that like many a biographer she has fallen in love with her subject. This is possibly unavoidable, I’m thinking of testing the theory with a biography of Stalin– although history shows us that enough people have blindly fallen in love with him so why not a biographer? Anyway, Foreman clearly admires her subject but is also aware of her weaknesses.

Now I wonder if I would think differently had I read Caroline Chapman’s Elizabeth & Georgiana first, but after Foreman’s extremely well researched and written book Chapman’s biography was a massive disappointment.

Chapman also has fallen in love with her subject but has also quite clearly been wearing rose coloured glasses while writing the book. This has made it necessary for her to make continuous excuses on behalf of her heroine. The more Chapman defends poor Elizabeth, the more I start to feel like she was an extremely annoying and opportunistic woman.

When Elizabeth and Georgiana first met, Elizabeth was pretty much an outcast of society. She had left her husband, and doing so had no means of supporting herself and no respectful house would ever welcome her to a social event. So when she met the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire who both took a liking to her and were willing to support her financially it must have felt like a godsend. But not to Chapman, who says it is unlikely that in a situation like that a person would see and opportunity and grab it. Yeah, right.

That Georgiana and Elizabeth became best friends is an undoubted fact, they wrote thousands of letters to each other and were as close as any two friends can possibly be until Georgiana’s death.  Georgiana made sure her friend had a position in the Devonshire household and that she was treated with respect. After her death it was a completely different ballgame. Georgiana’s children resented the fact that Elizabeth stayed on and behaved like the lady of the house. They disliked her and felt that her attempts of friendship were forced and artificial. Now this tells more about the children’s feelings than about the personality of poor Elizabeth, but Chapman feels it her duty to remind the reader that the children were clearly wrong. Because once again it is impossible to see how someone who has just lost a beloved mother would be annoyed when her friend / their father’s lover decides to hang around instead of just plain moving out.

And so on and so forth. Every time someone dares criticize the lovely Elizabeth to her rescue comes Chapman like a knight in shining armour. And critics she had plenty of. Elizabeth lived a long life for example excavating the ruins of Rome and being, according to Chapman, the light and heart of Roman society – or, according to some of her contemporaries an upstart, a-know-it-all, a Georgiana-wannabe.

The further I read the more annoyed I became. So what if Elizabeth was annoying? There are plenty of people in this world who are annoying; it doesn’t make them any less interesting. Trying to undermine the intellectuality of the reader on the other hand makes me see red. Every letter of Georgiana’s children is rebutted with a quote from someone who’s really not relevant to the situation. But maybe some good became from reading both books: I’m still very curious about the mysterious Elizabeth, the captivating Georgiana and the Duke who in possibly the most famous threesome in history is left with the role of a minor character.