The Life and Letters of Emma Hamilton
The Life and Letters of Emma Hamilton

Author: Hugh Tours

Publisher: Frontline Books

Published: 2020-03-30

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 1526770466

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Emma, Lady Hamilton, rose from poverty to become a media celebrity, and her relationship with Admiral Nelson, and her renowned beauty, made her the most instantly-recognisable woman of her era, with the press following her every move. She was a friend of Queen Maria Carolina of Naples, longed-after by the Prince of Wales, and was a high society fashion icon. Born in 1765, Emma was the daughter of the village blacksmith in Neston, Cheshire, who died just two months later, leaving the family in difficult circumstances. After failing to find a permanent position locally, Emma took the stagecoach to London and the start of her remarkable journey to international fame. Emma worked for various actresses at Dury Lane theatre, before becoming a dancer, a model and, later, a hostess. Her beauty brought her to the attention of Charles Grenville, the second son of the Earl of Warwick, who took her as his mistress, and became the model for the painter George Romney. These paintings thrust Emma into the social spotlight and she soon became London’s top celebrity. When Grenville needed to find a rich wife, Emma was passed onto Sir William Hamilton, British Envoy to Naples. The couple fell in love and were married in September 1791. When in Naples, Lady Hamilton, as she now was, became a close friend of Queen Maria Carolina, sister of Marie Antoinette. It was also in Naples that she met Admiral Nelson – and the great love affair began. Much has been written about this later period of her life, but with Hugh Tours making full use of the letters Emma wrote as well as those she received throughout her life, the fascinating story of her early years is also revealed. This is history as moving as a great tragic novel; most moving of all, being the return, after Trafalgar, of Emma’s last letter to Nelson, unopened.

Beloved Emma
Beloved Emma

Author: Flora Fraser

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2012-03-11

Total Pages: 550

ISBN-13: 1408832569

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'Bewitchingly readable, authoritative' The Times 'At last, in Flora Fraser, Lady Hamilton has a biographer able to capture both the woman and her times' Amanda Foreman Born in the eighteenth century, Emma Hamilton was a woman ahead of her time. Her rise to fame and fortune seemed unstoppable – until she began her infamous love affair with Admiral Lord Nelson. Beloved Emma follows Emma Hamilton's journey from Liverpool to London and her life as an artist's assistant, through glittering successes as the wife of Sir William Hamilton in Naples, and that notorious romance with Nelson, to her painful descent from the heights of fame to an early death in Calais. Flora Fraser captures the energy, purpose and sexuality that drove this extraordinary woman through her tumultuous life.

Nelson's Letters to Lady Hamilton and Related Documents
Nelson's Letters to Lady Hamilton and Related Documents

Author: Marianne Czisnik

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-09-28

Total Pages: 537

ISBN-13: 1000071685

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This critical edition of Admiral Nelson’s letters to Lady Hamilton is to bring together the important letters of Nelson to Lady Hamilton that have only been published in parts over the last 200 years. Only by bringing the letters of Nelson to Lady Hamilton together is it possible to assess their relationship and to present certain insights into Nelson’s personality that are not revealed in his official correspondence. Thorough research into this side of Nelson’s personality and into the nature of his notorious and unconventional relationship with Lady Hamilton has been hampered in the past by a desire not to look too closely at Nelson’s personal morality. To a considerable extent their relationship was regarded as a challenge to traditional gender roles and it indeed did not conform to stereotypes that are usually attributed to men and women in a heterosexual relationship. Lady Hamilton was so obviously lacking in the subservience and passivity expected from women in that era that authors over the course of time started to exclude her in their accounts of the public sphere by reducing her to a private weakness of Nelson’s, who could be successful at sea, where he was far away from the enthralling influence of a manipulating woman. The letters in this edition testify how Admiral Nelson’s life at sea was not exclusively public nor was Lady Hamilton’s life ashore solely private. It also shows how the two supposedly separate spheres of male and female lives were connected. A fresh approach and a thorough discussion of this important and neglected aspect not only of Nelson’s life, but of gender history, demands this exact and scholarly edition of the primary material, which consists of about 400 letters that Nelson wrote to Lady Hamilton over the course of the last seven years of his life and about a dozen letters of her to him that have survived.