The life and afterlives of Harriette Wilson (1786 – 1845)

Description

Harriette Wilson’s 1825 memoirs of her life as a courtesan are one of the most well-known examples of courtesan memoirs of the long eighteenth century. They also mark the life of the last great courtesan of the Regency and paint a lively picture of a demi-monde that had ended at the dawn of the Victorian Age. Drawing on a ready-made audience of readers that would have been familiar with fictional ‘whore memoirs’ by male authors such as Defoe’s Roxana and Cleland’s Fanny Hill, as well as short biographies of famous courtesans by male hacks, Wilson’s memoirs stand out for their complex self-fashioning, and their revelations of personal experiences as well as for their withholding of explicit sexual details. The memoirs were out of print and largely forgotten by the general public until English biographer and travel writer Lesley Blanch republished them in 1955 accompanied by a novella-length biographical introduction entitled Regency England Undressed: Harriette Wilson, the Greatest Courtesan of her Age. In more recent years, Wilson’s life and memoirs were the subject of a 1999 biography entitled Harriette Wilson, Lady of Pleasure by Valerie Grosvenor Myer (with an introduction by Sue Limb) and a 2003 biography by Frances Wilson (no relation): The Courtesan’s Revenge: The Woman who Blackmailed the King. Wilson’s memoirs have also inspired the 2017 fictional courtesan memoir The Comfortable Courtesan, a multi-genre project by historian of gender and sexuality L.A. Hall, which offers a fictional narrative of the exploits of a courtesan working under similar circumstances and in the same period as Wilson.

This paper discusses Wilson’s intricate self-fashioning as a woman selling intimate acts as a courtesan as well as intimate words as a writer of scandal for money. While this trade in acts and words may be seen as a form of commoditized intimacy, it was also, as Frances Wilson observes, a way for Wilson “to relive, rewrite, and re-create her past.” (196). Building on recent scholarship by Lisa O’Connell, Amy Culley and Julie Peakman, I examine Wilson’s depiction of sex, pregnancy and the female body. I read Wilson’s own memoirs particularly with an eye to the limits and possibilities of self-exposure of sexual activity for a woman in the early nineteenth century, tracing their consequences and reception in their contemporaneous readership. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s work on the political possibilities of sentimentality (2008) I read the twentieth- and twenty-first-century textual afterlives of Wilson with an eye to the new potential of (re)writing women’s private and public lives, and their negotiation of embodied connections with a contemporary readership.

Period	23 Sept 2022
Event title	FAAAM conference "Intimate Politics in Anglophone Women's Writings"
Event type	Conference
Location	Paris, FranceShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International