85 Books Like England's Mistress

Vigée Le Brun knew Emma Hamilton (one of the “characters” of her day), painted her more than once, and tells us several anecdotes about Emma in her memoirs. Emma’s biography thus helps to round out a picture of the society in which Vigée Le Brun lived. 

Fraser gives us a readable, sympathetic, and convincing account of how strikingly beautiful Emma rose from lowly origins to the cream of society as wife of Sir William Hamilton, Britain’s ambassador to the court of Naples.

Secure in her place as Lady Hamilton, Emma had a notorious and passionate love affair with England’s great hero, Admiral Lord Nelson. His death at the Battle of Trafalgar (1805) left Emma and their daughter destitute.

And, as you can also tell from the title, we have now moved into more academic circles. Here we have some primary sources on Nelson’s intense relationship with Emma, thus allowing the two key participants in that drama to speak for themselves. They do, and it is all quite eye-opening. There’s much on the stresses of the war, and the trials of separation, but touching moments, too, and real concern for their daughter. Despite the editor being a little too sympathetic to Nelson, who was, after all, having his hardtack and eating it, and there being gaps in the correspondence at key times, such as Naples in June 1799, when the couple was together, this is a great book to understand the couple’s dynamic and the context of their relationship. 

The biography by Hugh Tours is also rather scholarly (I suspect the author is of a legalistic bent) and he sets out with the intention of being scrupulously fair. That is rewarding as is the fact that when the author doesn’t know something, or is supposing something happened, he generally says so. This is nice and balanced and makes the book a great entry point into Emma’s world. It is also reasonably short, which helps the book in its role as a useful primer as does the old-school structure of beginning in the beginning and moving on from there. Don’t expect great wit or sharp prose, though, there are better books for that.

Walter Sichel’s biography, for all its flaws, and the fact that more is available on Emma and Nelson now than was the case 120 years ago, is still a solid piece of work from a capable biographer and decent historian. There’s an elegance in the language that can be looked up to, and an understanding of the period that has few rivals. I view it like a pair of comfortable slippers. They aren’t perfect, perhaps with a hole in the toe, but you don’t want them to make an impression. You do, however, look forward to slipping them on. The other reason I like this book is that it means you don’t have to read any of the other Victorian biographies of Emma or Nelson, many of which are drivel.

During the Napoleonic Wars, the Royal Navy was the largest employer in the world. It maintained a fleet of close on 1,000 ships, including over 100 line-of-battle ships, and was responsible for the entire organisation of maintaining them at sea. Through his evocative selection of 100 objects Glover takes you back in time to share his admiration for a golden age when Britain ruled the seas.

It is an extraordinary fact that no one had written a book on the naval war after 1803 for nearly two hundred years.

In the same time period, hundreds of books have covered Trafalgar and Nelson, and some good books have appeared on parts of the war. But until James Davey’s extensive documentary research in this book, nobody had seen it as a whole. Engagingly written, full of telling stories, this tells the story of a worldwide war.

A lot of the fiction and non-fiction around the Age of Sail and the Georgian navy focuses on the officers and the larger battles, so this book, discussing the lives of ordinary sailors, is very refreshing.

I read it for research for my own writing and really enjoyed the excerpts from the letters and other documents of the diverse groups of men (and women) who sailed on the ships of the line.

There is an intimacy there of seeing how these various stories and lives played out against the backdrop of wider events and political issues. It is something I always bear in mind while writing my own (fictional) narratives. 

There are many great books written about the fledgling US Navy that came into its own during the campaign of 1812.  As an Army officer, I was compelled to read them all when researching if my book, Old Ironsides, Eagle of the Sea if I were to compete with that of the ‘old saults’. George was challenged not only to define the complexities of the fledgling American frigates, but to contrast it with the proven rulers of the waves.  The British navy had not had a significant challenge since the magnificent history laid down by captain Horacio Nelson. The unpresented victories over the Royal Navy’s frigates were “uncalled for” according to the London Times. If there is one book to read about the epic struggle at sea, this is the one to choose.

Long before people had any tolerance for such nonsense—meaning back in 1822—an anonymous genius published an version of the life of Lord Nelson unlike any other. I mean specifically that this book, Albion, is 234 pages long and contains approximately forty-five impressionistic run-on sentences.

In 1922 such an account of a recent war—compare with David Jones’s strange, difficult WWI prose-poem "In Parenthesis," for example—would be merely audacious, but in 1822, it was completely baffling; which is too bad, because for two hundred years the text has lingered in obscurity. (I have reason to believe I’m the only living human to have read it in its entirety.)

But a pointillist biography of Nelson—as narrated by the great man himself to the angel that bears his soul to heaven after his death at Trafalgar—is exactly what the world has been missing!

This book holds a special place in my bookshelves. Reprinted many times it is a classic reference to the period. Lavery’s description of life at sea is unparalleled, depicting a world far removed from the hardships and cruelty that is often attributed to conditions on the lower deck.