Too Great A Lady
The Notorious, Glorious Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
Emma Hamilton is renowned as the real-life heroine of the greatest love story in British history, as legendary for her beauty as for her passionate love affair with Britain’s greatest hero, Lord Horatio Nelson. Amanda Elyot breathes new life into this remarkable woman, in what might have been Emma’s very own words.
The impoverished daughter of an illiterate country farrier, young Emily Lyon sold coal by the roadside to help put food on the family’s table. By the time she was 15, she had made her way from London nursemaid to vivacious courtesan, and continued a meteoric rise through society, rung by slippery rung, to become the most talked-about woman in all of Europe, mistress of many tongues, a key envoy in Britain’s and Italy’s war against the French, and confidante to a queen.
This novel, inspired by her remarkable life, recounts Emma’s many extraordinary adventures, the earth-shattering passion she eventually found with Lord Nelson, and how they braved the censure of king and country, risking all in the name of true love.
“A thoughtful retelling of the life of a common-born beauty and her infamous love affair with Admiral Lord Nelson.”—Susan Holloway, author of Duchess
“An energetic portrait of a unique historical figure.”—Publishers Weekly
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In order to eventually take her place in history as mistress of turn-of-the-19th-century English war hero Horatio "Hornblower" Nelson, Emma Hamilton must first socially ascend "rung by slippery rung" in Leslie Carroll's bright, meticulously researched novel (her third historical written as Elyot). A roadside coal peddler as a child in North Wales, Emma arrives in London at age 12 and works as a nursery maid, brothel entertainer, medicine-show chorus girl and mistress to several titled gentlemen before marrying Sir William Hamilton, "envoy extraordinary and ambassador plenipotentiary to the Court of the Two Sicilies." As Lady Hamilton, Emma becomes a close confidante of Queen Maria Carolina of Sicily and is pivotal in cementing England and Sicily's alliance as the Napoleonic wars get underway. Friendships with Haydn, Goethe and Marie Antoinette don't prepare Emma for Nelson, with whom she ultimately embarks on a scandalous five-year affair. Elyot gives Emma a rippingly bawdy, occasionally self-aggrandizing first-person, that, while sometimes grating, rings true. The result is an energetic portrait of a unique historical figure.
