Bettie's Books

bookshelves: radio-4, summer-2012, autobiography-memoir, play-dramatisation

Nancy Carroll plays the notorious courtesan with a trail of rich and powerful lovers.

Adapted by Ellen Dryden.

blurb - Nancy Carroll stars as Harriette Wilson, one of the most infamous and talked-about women of the early 19th century. Her lovers included aristocrats, adventurers and even the Duke of Wellington himself. And when they all ceased to support her after her retirement, she had a simple bargain for them - 'pay up, and I'll keep you out of my memoirs'.

A scandalous bestseller of their time, her memoirs reveal a sharp-witted, good-hearted, infinitely adaptable, madcap woman who took on the patriarchy of the time and did something close to beating them at their own game.

Harriette's exciting, secretive, unpredictable world is brought vividly to life in Ellen Dryden's radio dramatization of the book which set the whole country gossiping about the behaviour of the men who ran it, and the women they loved.

Cast: Harriette ...... Nancy Carroll
Ponsonby/ Melbourne ...... Charles Edwards
Wellington ...... Barnaby Kay
Argyle ....... Blake Ritson
Julia....... Leila Hackett
Fanny ...... Anna Francolini
Amy/Old Woman ....... Abigail Burdess
Tom Sheridan ....... Jonathan Dryden
Taylor Frederick/ Alvanley ....... Richard Galazka
Mrs Porter ...... Sarah Finigan

Producer: Ellen Dryden A First Writes Radio production for BBC Radio 4.

19th century London produced a fine flowering of eccentrics and individualists. Chief among them was Harriette Wilson, whose patrons included most of the distinguished men of the day, from the Duke of Wellington to Lord Byron. She held court in a box at the opera, attended by statesmen, poets, national heroes, aristocrats, members of the beau monde, and students who hoped to be immortalized by her glance. She wrote these memoirs in middle age, when she had fallen out of favor, and she advised her former lovers that 200 of them would be edited out. The result is an elegant, zestful, unrepentant memoir, which offers intimately detailed portraits of the Regency demimonde