Gossip, scandal, wit and lots of bosom-heaving sex! Bridgerton has caused millions to flutter their lashes and swoon as it quickly soared its way into petticoats and hearts. Within the first 28 days of its release more than 82 million households had taken in the gloriously British romp, becoming Netflix’s most-watched show of time. Creator Shonda Rhimes (Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Scandal) cleverly matched colour-blind casting with sumptuously colourful costumes to explore the saucy lives of a Regency era aristocratic cast of characters that defied the traditional period drama model.
Oscar Wilde tour guide Dan Vo watched the series with his history house expert spectacles on and spotted some of his favourite historical places and breathtaking country homes serving as the backdrop of this vivacious reimaged England. For example In London, there’s Ranger’s House in Greenwich, serving as the home of Lady Bridgerton, her four sons (Anthony, Benedict, Colin, and Gregory), and her four daughters (Daphne, Eloise, Francesca, and Hyacinth) as well as the extravagant Syon House standing in for The Duke of Hastings’ home. Read on to discover the rich history each of these places has and their real-life significance in Regency times. (more…)
At the end of this very real annus terribilis, I want to say a few words to you, our loyal readers and attendees. Above all, thanks! Thanks for keeping Shady Ladies Tours alive by reading our blog, attending our Zoom tours, watching our YouTube videos, contributing to our fundraisers—in short, for being a fabulously loyal community. When the pandemic hit the US, in March, it seemed likely to kill the company completely. Who would have thought that 9 months later, as the pandemic continued to rage, we would be putting on our 18th Zoom tour, with audiences regularly over 100, and have gathered over 28,000 views for our videos? It’s been a hard year, but ours is a tiny, flourishing corner. And we have a lot more coming after the holidays! Want to find out more? (more…)
London’s National Portrait Gallery has a great collection of portraits of famous and important people from British history. If you ask the general public what that means, they would tell you it’s a great place to see images of kings, queens, prime ministers, and other great people (mostly men). But actually, the National Portrait Gallery’s collection is much more fun than people realize. It contains a lot of portraits of people with really entertaining stories, and these stories often revolve around the one thing that can make historical people seem really relatable: love and sex. And many of the most interesting stories are about *women*.
One of the great things about England is its grand, historic houses, what the British call “stately homes.” Today’s post is about two castles with an LGBTQ past. And who better to write about LGBTQ England and its Queerest Stately Homes than Nick Collinson and Dan Vo? Nick is the founder of the LGBTQ working group at English Heritage, and Dan, who developed the well-known LGBTQ tours at the Victoria and Albert Museum and is now project manager of the Queer Heritage and Collections Network, a partnership of the National Trust, English Heritage, Historic England, and Historic Royal Palaces.
Nick: When I decided to form our group at English Heritage, one of the names that was suggested was ‘Stately Homos’. We decided against that name firstly because we are custodians of many other sites besides stately homes (Stonehenge, Hadrian’s Wall, Dover Castle etc…) and also we wanted to include all parts of LGBTQ England and its spectrum of genders and sexualities.
But it got me to thinking about all those homos who lived in stately homes, and all the debauchery that must have gone on in the billiard rooms, bedchambers, back stairs and butteries. Many of these homes are hundreds of years old, and the sheer number of staff they employed means that a significant number must have been interested in a bit of same-sex screwing from time to time. Unfortunately, due to the way history has been recorded, it is incredibly difficult to uncover stories about those ‘below stairs’ but the sexual goings-on of some of the more illustrious inhabitants have been recorded for posterity…
Madresfield Court: Brideshead and the Beauchamp scandal
Madresfield is one of those fairytale gothic erections, set in parkland beneath the Malvern Hills in Worcestershire. It has been in the Lygon family since the 1100’s – longer than any other dwelling in the UK, apart
Madresfield
from a few owned by the Royal Family.
The Lygons are famous in the LGBTQ community. Well, not under their real name—but they are the model for the Flyte family in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited: Sebastian, the narrator/Waugh’s big college crush was called Hugh Lygon in real life. But while the novel focuses on Sebastian’s *father’s* scandal, Waugh never mentions what the real scandal was about.
Well….William Lygon, 7th Lord Beauchamp, inherited the house in the late 1800s. He was holder of many high
Lord Beauchamp
public offices, including Governor of New South Wales in Australia. He suffered a spectacular fall from grace when he was ‘outed’ to the King by his bitter and twisted brother-in-law Hugh “Bend’or” Grosvenor, Duke of Westminster (probably because he had such a gay nickname himself!). We know Beauchamp had a penchant for good looking servants, as detailed by this tongue-in-cheek article in the Australian Star:
The most striking feature of the vice-regal ménage is the youthfulness of its members … Rosy cheeked footmen, clad in liveries of fawn, heavily ornamented in silver and red brocade, with many lanyards of the same hanging in festoons from their broad shoulders, [who] stood in the doorway, and bowed as we passed in … Lord Beauchamp deserves great credit for his taste in footmen.
While he was hosting a dinner in the medieval Great Hall at Madresfield, one of the guests was shocked when they overheard Beauchamp saying to the handsome Butler, Bradford, “Je t’adore”. The guest relayed this exchange to fellow guest Harold Nicolson (see below) in disbelief, but Nicolson, in all his bisexual wisdom, replied “Nonsense – he said ‘shut the door.’”! Always looking out for each other *wink wink nudge nudge*…
Madresfield Court is littered with little material clues to the aesthete Earl’s homosexuality, from the quartz balusters surrounding the mezzanine floor in the center of the house, to the seat covers in the library that he embroidered himself while in exile. I’m not saying that his propensity to sew and his love of shiny things is evidence enough for his being gay, but these little details add a rich timbre to the stories about him. Looking at and visiting the places where people actually lived, provide an extra dimension and tangibility to their stories. Beauchamp definitely had the Queer Eye!
Sissinghurt Castle: Queer Love Triangles in an Idyllic Garden
Dan: Great to hear Harold Nicholson would look out for a fellow indulgent queer! He was certainly one who succumbed to much temptation in his lifetime, and where better a backdrop for illicit liaisons than in a garden. I would like to conjure up in your mind a glorious and bountiful Garden of Eden, where queer sexuality was as fragrant, and flagrant, as the rich blooms. The setting is Sissinghurst Castle Garden, and it was the creation of husband and wife Harold Nicholson and author Vita Sackville-West—a couple that had a fascinatingly post-modern harmonious understanding concerning each other’s extramarital, same-sex affairs. Not that it wasn’t sometimes complicated, for example when Vita had a love affair with Harold’s sister Gwen St Aubyn. Let’s return to that shortly.
Vita called Sissinghurst her “Sleeping Beauty’s castle.” What’s remarkable is the way in which the garden was
Sissinghurst white garden
created in order to foster the many relationships that Harold and Vita had. Vita reminisced about the warm moonlit summer evenings, when love could flourish among the flowers and bushes arranged into intimate outdoor rooms and pleasant vistas. There living quarters were also divided in a similar way; the couple’s younger son Nigel (whose book Portrait of a Marriage revealed his parents’ lifestyle to the public) compared the house to a village, where everyone could live together, yet also have their own separate and private lives. Vita for instance claimed the romantic Elizabethan Tower, where she had her study, whereas Harold’s study was to be found in the South Cottage. The careful organization of the couple’s life was also seen in the movements of their lovers. Harold worked during the week in London, where he often shared his bed with a series of younger men. Vita would send her lovers, whom Harold called her béguins—infatuations—away for the weekend when Harold returned to Sissinghurst, although sometimes he arrived with another guest that his boys would dismiss as “one of Daddy’s new friends”.
Vita’s lovers included her sister-in-law Gwen St Aubyn, socialite Violet Trefusis, and most famously author Virginia Woolf, who imaginatively portrayed Vita as the gender-shifting hero/heroine of her novel Orlando. As
Vita in 1918 by William Strang
was said of the Bloomsbury group, Vita tended to “love in triangles”. The triangle between Vita, Harold, and Harold’s sister Gwen certainly illustrates the unique marriage arrangement between Vita and Harold. Another significant and perhaps even more complicated love triangle was the one between Vita, Violet, and Virginia. Violet fell in love with Vita while they were still teenagers, and while both married, the relationship almost broke up both marriages. Vita even interrupted Violet’s honeymoon to demand Violet sleep with her, and some accounts indicate Violet had given exclusive sexual rights to Vita alone! Harold was unusually perturbed and put his foot down and (having flown to France in a two-seater with Violet’s husband to recover Vita) demanded an end to the relationship. While her affair with Virginia occurred later, the ghost remained, and Virginia acknowledged this in Orlando by having Violet appear as Princess Sasha, the object of Orlando’s deepest affection.
Orlando is set in (a fictional version) of another nearby stately home Vita’s childhood and ancestral home, Knole, but it is at Sissinghurst—and especially in the garden—that one finds the essence of Vita’s (and Harold’s) amazing take on sexuality and relationships, making it one of the greatest Stately Homes in LGBTQ England.
Bold and sexy women must always have existed everywhere, but in history they seem to be a French specialty. There are a number of places where you can learn about them in Paris. The Louvre and Orsay museums are great, for instance, or the royal palace at Versailles. But if you are interested in the colorful sides of Paris women’s history, don’t miss Père Lachaise Cemetery!
Père Lachaise, founded under Napoleon in 1804, was Paris’s first non-sectarian cemetery. It was also the first garden cemetery, a 19th century trend that brought us London’s so-called Magnificent Seven cemeteries, New
Père Lachaise Cemetery
York’s Green-wood, Boston’s Mount Auburn, and so on. These cemeteries were intended as parks, where the public could stroll and even picnic. And one of the attractions (aside from groves, ponds, etc) was meant to be the magnificent tombs of well-known people. Indeed, the founders of Père Lachaise jump-started this aspect by transferring some famous tombs there, including the one you see above. Thus is the joint tomb of the iconic romantic couple of the Middle Ages, theologian Abélard and his abbess wife Héloïse.
And they were certainly successful in attracting the tombs of the prominent—including many prominent women. There are certainly famous men in the cemetery, such as (to start with composers) Chopin, Rossini, and Bizet. And the two most visited tombs are those of English-world celebs Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison. Yet there are many fascinating women buried here as well. A short list would be long but would have to include: Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, Colette, Maris Callas, and Edith Piaf. These are the kind of bold and sexy women that makes Paris women’s history so special and intriguing.
Here are three of my favorite tombs in Père Lachaise. Two are of women, and one is (as I will explain) important to Parisian women.
The racy writer
I’ll start with one from my list above: the tomb of Colette, which is right near the main
Colette’s tomb
entrance to the cemetery. Colette was an astonishing person. She is probably the most famous French woman writer today. Her four early Claudine novels are very popular in France. And her last book, Gigi, is well-known around the world—mainly, no doubt, because of the movie, starring Audrey Hepburn—whom Colette herself discovered. She was also a racy person. After she had left her first husband (who discovered her gift for writing but kept the copyrights to her first books for himself) she created a scandal by carrying on an affair with a cross-dressing aristocrat called Mathilde de Morny, and generally known at the time as Max or uncle Max. The scandal reached its peak when Colette and Max
Colette and Max
kissed on stage at the Moulin Rouge—a pretty bold gesture for 1907! Colette kept most of her raciness for her writing, however, in which her biggest themes are lesbianism and courtesans—the high class sex workers who were so important in Belle Epoque Paris’s life and of whom Colette’s Gigi is the most famous example.
The cross-dressing painter
A thruple in death: Ducas, Bonheur, Klumpke
Next is another tomb of a bold and racy woman, the painter Rosa Bonheur. Bonheur is not famous today, but before the Impressionists began the turn toward abstraction that typifies modern art, she was a big star of the art world. An example in an American museum is the vast hyperrealistic The Horse Fair that fills a wall at the Metropolitan Museum.
Bonheur probably interests modern viewers more as a personality than as an artist, though. She was one of those artistic 19th century women who lived her life in households consisting of two women—what today historians call ‘Boston marriages.’ It is impossible for us to know what went on in private, but one tends to assume that the women in these ‘marriages’ were mostly what today we would call lesbians. But Bonheur was not only probably a lesbian, she was also what we would call gender-queer. She was strikingly non-feminine and often dressed in men’s clothing. She lived in two Boston marriages: the first with a woman called Nathalie Ducas, the second (after Ducas’s death) with an American painter called Anna Klumpke.
Bonheur by Klumpke
I am giving you two pictures. One is a striking portrait of the elderly Bonheur by Klumpke, the other the Ducas family tomb, where not only Nathalie is buried, but also Bonheur and Klumpke both (as you can see from the plaques on the front).
The fertility cult
Finally, let me show you one of the sights every Parisian knows in the cemetery: the tomb of Victor Noir. Noir a young left-wing journalist who was shot by Prince Pierre Bonaparte, and his tomb long served As the center of many left-wing rallies. You might think you’re seeing things, but no, that really is a realistic death erection in his trousers,
Victor Noir’s tomb
and yes, it is rubbed clean of verdigris. If you look carefully, you can see that his lips are also clean. That is because Victor, with his erection, serves as a fertility cult place-of-worship for Parisian women who want to pray to find a boyfriend, get pregnant etc. The tradition is that you kiss his lips, leave flowers in his hand (as you can see in the photo) or hat and rub his erection. I have heard from some gay friends that they pray to Victor Noir as well!
So if you want to know about Paris women’s history—the history of bold and sexy women that really is one of the things that makes Paris Paris—don’t only visit the museums and Versailles. Take a stroll around Père Lachaise as well! Or, if you can’t go to Paris (because none of us can go anywhere right now!) take Shady Ladies Tours’ Père Lachaise tour on Zoom the next time we offer it.
Paris is the great city for the history of racy women. Certainly, other places have contributed—particularly Italy during the Renaissance. But from the time the Renaissance took off in France, scandalous French women have taken most of the world prizes for raciness. (more…)
The world’s museums are full of scandals and secrets. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, known simply as Madame X, is a great example. When it
was unveiled at the 1884 Paris Salon, it caused such a scandal that Sargent’s career was almost destroyed. Who after all would want to hire a portrait-painter who caused scandals at the Salon? It was also damaging, of course, for Gautreau’s reputation as a society beauty. Her family begged Sargent to withdraw the painting from the Salon, but he refused. After the Salon, however, he repainted the detail that had caused the biggest scandal. (more…)
It seems unbelievably dated, but people are still calling ambitious, intelligent women “nasty women.” As if that could hurt anyone’s feelings in 2020! In fact, like many other outdated insults, it has the opposite effect. Many women today are are taking the term on (as lesbians took on the term ‘dyke’) and calling themselves “nasty women” in sarcastic protest. (more…)
One of the fun things to look at in the Metropolitan museum is the way artists portray women’s breasts—because while you might imagine that the modern obsession with large breasts is universal, in fact ideal breasts vary from cultural moment to cultural moment. In particular, it is pretty clear that the Renaissance favored small breasts. The corsets in fashion at that time created an upper body shape similar to the shape of a man’s chest in armor. It seems the women’s corsets squashed their breasts out sideways to create this effect. And Renaissance nudes’ breasts are influenced by the way women looked when clothed: their breasts are not large, sit low on the chest, and are quite far apart. In the 18th and 19th centuries, by contrast, women’s breasts reflect a different kind of corset: they are larger, higher, and closer together.
One of the most important traditions among women painters is the self-portrait in which the artist claims her status as an artist. This is a 19th century English example, by the painter Mary Ann Alabaster, who shows you herself painting a portrait of herself (a self-portrait within a self-portrait) surrounded by her works in different genres. (more…)
