Catherine Peters

The Horizontal Blackmailer

The Courtesan's Revenge: Harriette Wilson, The Woman Who Blackmailed The King

By

Faber & Faber 359pp £20 order from our bookshop

COURTESANS Alli THE latest literary fashion. Accounts of their lives, presenting them as free spirits and protofeminists who could dictate the terms on which they worked, are tumbling from the presses. Although I can’t entirely agree with this rosy picture, Frances Wilson’s life of Harriette Wilson, the most notorious of early nineteenthcentury courtesans, is an absorbing read.

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