Perdita: The Literary, Theatrical, Scandalous Life Of Mary Robinson - Rilegato

“A remarkable woman and an exceptional biography.”
–Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

“A fascinating, page-turning, and probably definitive biography of this intriguing woman.”
–Emma Donoghue, author of Life Mask and Slammerkin

“Like her sometime patron, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, brilliant Mary Robinson flared like a comet through late eighteenth-century England’s elite society. Literary sleuth Paula Byrne has ransacked archives across the world to piece together the most complete account to date of this fascinating woman. Perdita is an absorbing study in chiaroscuro of a woman too beautiful and too complex for even Reynolds and Gainsborough to capture on canvas.”
–Gillian Gill, author of Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale

“We seem to have an insatiable appetite for biographies of eighteenth century women. . . . A superbly researched and narrated life of a woman whose capacity for self-transformation, when combined with beauty, talent, wit, and passion suggest that she may be the most interesting of them all . . . a fine biographer has conjured up a dazzling personality and brought her, laughing, back to life.”
–Miranda Seymour, Sunday Times (London)

“A work of genuine scholarship . . . a masterly portrait of a remarkable woman.”
–Sunday Telegraph (London)

PAULA BYRNE has a Ph.D. from the University of Liverpool, where she is a research fellow in English literature. A regular contributor to The Times Literary Supplement, she lives in Warwickshire with her two young children and her husband, the critic and biographer Jonathan Bate. Perdita is her first book to be published in the U.S.