Jane Ridley

Blithe spirit

Stephen Taylor has found a goldmine in the risqué memoirs of this charming, adventurous Georgian aristocrat, who bravely defied convention in the pursuit of true love

Lady Anne Barnard is a name that means almost nothing today, but her story is a remarkable one. She defied all the expectations governing the behaviour of upper-class women in 18th-century society, yet she made a success of her life. She died leaving six volumes of unpublished autobiography with a stern injunction that her papers were never to be published. For 200 years her memoirs have languished in the family archive, and Stephen Taylor is the first biographer to reveal her secrets.

Anne was the daughter of a threadbare Scottish peer, Lord Balcarres, and she grew up the eldest of 11 children in a prisonlike tower house in Fife. Pushed by her mother to contract a conventional arranged marriage, trading her breeding for newly-gained wealth, Anne dug in her toes. She was surrounded by eager suitors but, for reasons that remain unclear in this book, she could never make up her mind, and she gained a reputation as a coquette who broke men’s hearts. The story of her life until the age of 40 is one of a constant procession of men — 20 serious suitors and at least 11 proposals, as well as countless admirers — but she refused them all.

Fleeing Scotland for London, she became a social sensation, in spite of her eccentricity, her Scottish accent and her strange, unfashionable clothes. She was friendly with the future George IV and an intimate of his mistress, the tiresome Mrs Fitzherbert. A fearless traveller, she thought nothing of paying a visit to Paris at the height of the revolution.

She attracted powerful patrons, many of whom were also her suitors. A vastly rich banker named Richard Atkinson managed her money, enabling her to buy a mansion in fashionable Berkeley Square.

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