Lillie Langtry

A very worthwhile book of the 19th-20th c. beauty and actress. Although the Masterpiece Theatre production, "Lillie", is very good, this book shows 'Mrs. Langtry' to be more human and also more vulnerable. We see that not every problem is solved with, "Don't fuss". The author lifts the veil perhaps as much as possible on this enigmatic personality.

Many prefer autobiographies to biographies because they feel they are getting the "real" story--straight from the horse's mouth. But when reading an autobio one must always remember: We are seeing a person as he or she wishes to be seen. This appears to have been especially true in the case of the great 19th-century beauty, Lillie Langtry, who rose from obscurity to become not only a mistress of the Prince of Wales, but a wealthy actress of international repute. She was also a friend of (and was immortalized by) Oscar Wilde and the artists Millais and Whistler. Lillie, who was born in 1853 on the Channel Island of Jersey and was gifted with arresting beauty, did not in any way, shape, or form have the life of the average woman of her time. She succeeded as a woman in a man's world. She also lived life in the spotlight--and what a life of scandal (which included the secret birth of an illegitimate daughter), illicit lovers, and reckless hedonism it was. In 1925, four years before her death at age 75, Lillie wrote her memoirs, entitled "The Days I Knew." As author Laura Beatty states, there were "no references to the Prince of Wales as her lover...or Arthur Jones" (who was her childhood friend and the great love of her life). Lillie herself remarked when criticised for the white-washing of her life: "You don't really think I would ever do such a thing as to write my real reminiscences, do you?" To that end, she appears to have destroyed much of her correspondence.But many of the letters Lillie herself wrote have survived, and they have been relied upon extensively by Beatty. Most notable are a bundle of Lillie's letters to her lover, Arthur Jones, that were discovered in the 1970s "preserved in his little green case in the attic at Portelet", his home in Jersey. Beatty provides us with an abundance of "snippets" from the many letters Lillie wrote, particularly during the period of her pregnancy, and they reveal a desperate, clingy side of Lillie that we see nowhere else; certainly, they reveal a side to Lillie that she herself did not choose to show us. Rather than being a chronicle of Lillie's career and achievements (as so many bios are), this is very much a book about Lillie, the person. Though we can never know for certain how she felt in every circumstance, Beatty does a splendid job in peeling off the masks that Wilde taught her to wear, revealing the person underneath. There have been a few other biographies written about Lillie, but having been written prior to the discovery of Jones's cache of letters, they are incomplete in their portrayal of this multi-faceted individual whose life, for all its wealth and pursuit of material pleasures was ultimately sad, lonely, and tragic. The book was published in 1999 in the UK. I have the soft-cover version, and it is 336 pages (including the index). There are 16 pages of black-and-white photos, which include a few old family photos, photos of her artistic friends, photos of her lo

Laura Beatty has written an excellent biography with this book. The author had access to letters writen to a long-time lover and admirer Arthur Jones that previous biographers did not. These letters were never meant to be seen by anybody else and they give an insight into her character that is available from few other sources.Lillie was the first of the 'supermodels' and the topic of this book is how the 'real' lillie delt with sudden fame in the hot house of manners and morals that was victorian high society. Lillie succeded on a grand scale, but read this book to find out what success cost her.If you are at all interested in Lillie Langtry this most recent of books is a must.