Biographers are notorious for falling in love with their subjects. It is the literary equivalent of the 'Stockholm Syndrome', the phenomenon which leads hostages to feel sympathetic towards their captors. The biographer is, in a sense, a willing hostage, held captive for so long that he becomes hopelessly enthralled.

There are obvious, intellectual motives which drive a writer to spend years, and sometimes decades, researching the life of a person long vanished, but they often mask a less clear although equally powerful compulsion: Most biographers identify with their subjects. It can be unconscious and no more substantial than a shadow flitting across the page. At other times identification plays so central a role that the work becomes part autobiography as, famously, in Richard Holmes's Footsteps: Adventures of a Romantic Biographer (1995).

Beautiful, glamorous and charismatic, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, was an icon of her age; she was also a compulsive gambler, an influential political operator, a drug addict, a doting mother and an adulteress.

In a world of decadence and excess, of great houses, extravagant parties and sexual intrigue, Georgiana, like her descendant, Diana, Princess of Wales, was publicly adored but personally troubled. From her complex menage a trois with her husband and best friend to her vast gambling debts; from her adoration of her children to her passionate but doomed love for Earl Grey, she was a fascinating, contradictory woman whose story still resonates today.

INTRODUCTION

PART ONE: DEBUTANTE

Debutante: 1757-1774

Fashion's Favourite: 1774-1776

The Vortex of Dissipation: 1776-1778

A Popular Patriot: 1778-1781

Introduction to Politics: 1780-1782

PART TWO: POLITICS

The Cuckoo Bird: 1782-1783

An Unstable Coalition: 1783

A Birth and a Death: 1783-1784

The Westminster Election: 1784

Opposition: 1784-1786

Queen Bess: 1787

Menage a Trois: 1788

The Regency Crisis: 1788-1789

PART THREE: EXILE

The Approaching Storm: 1789-1790

Exposure: 179o-1791

Exile: 1791-1793

Return: 1794-1796

Interlude: 1796

Isolation: 1796-1799

PART FOUR: GEORGIANA REDUX

Georgiana Redux: 1800-1801

Peacel 1801-1802

Power Struggles: 1802-1803

The Doyenne of the Whig Party:. 1803-1804

The Ministry of AU the Talents': 1804-1806

Epilogue

NOTES

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX