Volume 43, Number 11 · June 20, 1996
Star
By Fiona MacCarthy
Lola Montez: A Life
by Bruce Seymour
Yale University Press, 468 pp., $30.00
Lola Montez was caustic about the biographies that accumulated in her lifetime, accusing them of bearing no more resemblance to her than to the man in the moon. The inaccurate biographies continued after her death in New York in 1861. Typical is Edmund B. d'Auvergne's account, published in London in 1909, of the Spanish dancer who caused the abdication of a besotted King Ludwig I of Bavaria. It is fulsomely lubricious, in the Edwardian mode. He depicts her as the last of the long and illustrious line of women, including Aspasia and Cleopatra, before whom kings bent the knee in homage. There's a sense of male complicity in his description of Lola as 'a splendid animal, always doing what she wished to do.'
Review, 4080 words
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