Mrs Jordan's Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King

Description

Acclaimed as the greatest comic actress of her day, Dora Jordan lived a quite different role off-stage as lover to Prince William, third son of George III. Unmarried, the pair lived in a villa on the Thames and had ten children together until William, under pressure from royal advisers, abandoned her. The story of how Dora moved between the worlds of the eighteenth-century theatre and happy domesticity, of her fights for her family and her career makes a classic story of royal perfidy and female courage. 'The strangest and most sensational story Tomalin has told so far. A miraculously detailed portrait - as brisk, unsentimental, good-humoured and fairminded as its subject.' Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph 'Compelling, shrewd in its judgements, exceptionally well written, and informed by a vivid sense of the past.' John Gross, Sunday Telegraph 'Riveting. Conjures up a rich, alluring period which, in its brittle decadence and love of scandal and flamboyance, often seems closer than the nineteenth century to our own times. The most haunting biography I have read this year.' Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times 'Fascinating, affecting. A compelling story and Tomalin tells it with clarity and warmth.' Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Sunday Times

Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933 of a French father and an English mother, and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has worked in publishing and journalism all her life, becoming literary editor first of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times, which she left in 1986. She is also the author of The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize for 1974; Shelley and His World (reissued by Penguin in 1992); Katherine Mansfield- A Secret Life (Penguin 1988), a biography of the modernist writer on whom she also based her 1991 play The Winter Wife; the highly-acclaimed The Invisible Woman- The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Penguin 1991), which won the NCR Book Award for 1991, as well as the Hawthornden Prize and the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography; and Mrs Jordan's Profession (Penguin 1995), a study of the Regency actress. Other books written for Penguin are- Jane Austen- A Life and a collection of memoirs entitled Several Strangers.