Shadow of a Lady

The Drama of the Napoleonic Wars and the glitter of the Court of Naples provide the splendid setting for this richly rendered novel of two diametrically different women and the tempestuous love affairs that bound them in sympathy. No two women were more dissimilar than Lady Emma Hamilton and the wise and witty Helen Telfair. Emmy was a country lass, uneducated, sensual, with a charming giveaway accent, who by sheer will and the wily use of her surpassing beauty catapulted herself to a brilliant marriage and a delicious position as the confidante to Queen Maria Carolina of Naples. Her portraits-as a Bacchante, as Venus, as Diana-painted by an enamored Romney, were the scandal of London; her passion for the dashing and controversial Lord Nelson was the talk of Europe. In the shadow of this dazzling woman stood Helen Telfair. The daughter of out-of-pocket country gentry, independent, sensible, Helen was a bluestocking whose heroine was Mary Wollstonecraft and whose declared intent was never to marry. The two met as girls in England, and Helen was convinced she had encountered an angel. Years later, after Helen's reluctant marriage to the wealthy but libertine Lord Henry Meritt, they came together once again in the aftermath of the French Revolution at the Court of Naples. Emma's more enthusiastic marriage of convenience to Sir William Hamilton, England's ambassador to the brilliant Bourbon court, made possible her splendid salon at the Palazzo Sessa, where the luminaries of the era sparkled and schemed. Here Helen watched as the first seeds of the "the divine Emmy's" affection for Lord Nelson blossomed into an all-consuming passion and sought solace herself in the reawakening of and old love.