Georgina Weldon : The Fearless Life of a Victorian Celebrity - Joanna Martin

Georgina Weldon

The Fearless Life of a Victorian Celebrity

By: Joanna Martin

Hardcover | 21 January 2021

At a Glance

Hardcover


RRP $92.99

$74.50

20%OFF

or 4 interest-free payments of $18.63 with

 or 
In Stock and Aims to ship in 1-2 business days

When will this arrive by?

For more than a decade in the second half of the nineteenth century Georgina Weldon (1837-1914) was one of the most famous women in England. Weldon was an exceptional self-publicist, intelligent and utterly convinced that she was always in the right. A semi-professional singer, she came to prominence as a friend of the composer Charles Gounod. Her husband's unsuccessful attempt to have her carried off to a lunatic asylum caused a public scandal, and her subsequent efforts to drag her enemies through the law courts were widely reported. Weldon's resistance to being certified insane and her unceasing legal claims for defamation and/or loss of earnings contributed to changes in laws relating to private asylums and vexatious litigation.

Weldon sang in drawing rooms and concert halls, and on the music hall stage. She lectured on women's rights and law reform. The most notorious female plaintiff, and probably the first married women to represent herself in court, she advised many of her fellow litigants at a time when women were not permitted to practise law professionally. Her campaigns brought her notoriety and two gaol sentences.

Joanna Martin expertly retells the story of that notorious Victorian eccentric who suffered many bouts of delusion and was an ardent supporter of spiritualism. Martin's account manages to negotiate a biography situated between crazed behaviour and the pursuit of admirable causes. Weldon's story offers a wide canvas introducing phenomena such as celebrity culture and major and marginal characters of Dickensian quality. This biography of Weldon, based on primary sources including Weldon's own diaries and letters, therefore touches upon a wide variety of issues; Victorian society, nineteenth-century's women's history, the context of a social and cultural history of madness and marriage (law), and nineteenth-century British musical culture.

More in History

Emperor of the Seas : Kublai Khan and the Making of China - Jack Weatherford
We Do Not Part - Han Kang

RRP $35.00

$31.75

Ancestors : A prehistory of Britain in seven burials - Alice Roberts
Between Two Rivers : 'A WONDERFUL READ' -- TOM HOLLAND - Moudhy Al-Rashid
Half of a Yellow Sun - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

RRP $22.99

$21.90

Dark Emu : Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture - Bruce Pascoe
Junior Atlas of Indigenous Australia - Macquarie Dictionary

RRP $39.99

$27.80

30%
OFF
Unmasking the Killer of the Missing Beaumont Children - Stuart Mullins
History of Western Philosophy : Routledge Classics - Bertrand Russell
The Gulag Archipelago : 1918-56 - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

RRP $37.99

$33.90

11%
OFF
Night : Penguin Modern Classics - Elie Wiesel

RRP $22.99

$17.75

23%
OFF
The Origins of Totalitarianism : Penguin Modern Classics - Hannah Arendt