Mistress of the Arts: The Passionate Life of Georgina, Duchess of Bedford

This is the story of the life and loves of the sixth Duchess of Bedford. The daughter of one Duke, she eventually marries another, conveniently one of the richest men in the country.

The duchess was a leader of Regency high society, she lived a number of years at the heart of political and social intrigue, including two in Dublin when her husband was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. In her 40s she began an affair with the painter Edwin Landseer, 20 years her junior who was to become one of the heroes of Victorian art. The relationship lasted until the Duchess's death. For Landseer, who never married and suffered from mental illness in later years, she seems to have been the love of his life. The Duchess outlasted most of her fellow Regency socialites and lived on into the 1850s, by which time she must have seemed a relic of an earlier and racier era.

This book follows on from the success of fellow writer Amanda Foreman's Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire Trethewey uses letters and private papers very effectively in recreating the world in which the Duchess of Bedford moved. The personalities, particularly that of the energetic, life-affirming Duchess, emerge strongly from the pages. The book shows that the sixth Duchess of Bedford, previously relegated to the footnotes of history and to occasional pages in works on Landseer, does deserve biographical attention in her own right.