The Memoirs of Laetitia Horsepole

The Memoirs of Laetitia Horsepole

by JohnFuller (Author)

Synopsis

Discovered in the secret compartment of a North Italian cabinet, this enchanting manuscript may or may not be complete, and it may or may not be intended for posterity. Undeterred by these uncertainties, John Fuller gives us the early nineteenth-century 'memoirs' of Laetitia Horsepole, painter, philosopher and femme fatale. Shelley, apparently, came across this formidable woman, aged ninety, on his travels through Italy, and became her confidant and neighbour. Why, the reader may wonder, is she not better known? Why indeed? That long spell in Madagascar certainly interrupted her career. She was prickly and disinclined to ingratiate herself with the arbiters of fashionable taste. And then her virtual disappearance to Italy didn't help matters. But her obscurity gives added piquancy to the memoirs which - her idiosyncratic art theory and philosophy apart - are above all a dramatic eighteenth-century adventure in five acts which reflect her tempestuous involvement with the five 'husbands' of her life, from the brutish Crowther and the dull and the rich but louche Count Chiavari. Laetitia reflects on the vagaries of love and erotic involvement, on art and men, on flora and fauna, and reveals for the first time what actually happened in Madagascar. Shamelessly enjoyable, teasingly allusive, irresistibly funny and sometimes sad, Laetitia's is quite simply a brilliant and bewitching romance full of truths that lie deeper than fact.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 224
Edition: New Ed
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 02 May 2002

ISBN 10: 0099422573
ISBN 13: 9780099422570
Book Overview: Dazzling and enjoyable - why have we overlooked this extraordinary woman? Is this a genuine memoir? A work of art criticism? A scholarly bodice ripper? Brilliant ventriloquism? Try it for yourself- 20020218

Media Reviews
Fuller is a master storyteller. a rollicking picaresque yarn. a portrait of a high-spirted woman, sexually curious and intellectually insatiable * Sunday Telegraph *
A Moll Flanders of our time. A remarkable piece of work * Irish Sunday Independent *
Author Bio
John Fuller is an acclaimed poet and novelist, the author of thirteen volumes of verse and several works of fiction (backlist in Vintage). Flying to Nowhere was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was winner of a Whitbread Award. He is a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford.