Library Journal
Who better than an author of Regency romances (and an LJ reviewer) to tell the story of Grace Dalrymple Elliot, the notorious mistress of just about everyone in late 18th-century London.

Kirkus Reviews
Freewheeling biography of a racy Georgian demimondaine. Manning (Seducing Mr. Heywood, etc., not reviewed) was inspired to delve more deeply into the life of divorcee Grace Elliott (1754-1823) after seeing Eric Rohmer's film The Lady and the Duke, based on the Englishwoman's posthumously published memoir of surviving the Reign of Terror in Paris. Well, perhaps "delve" is not quite the verb that springs to mind when the result is a text notable for its breathless prose and fawning treatment of British aristocracy. Born Grace Dalrymple in Edinburgh, Elliott was educated in a continental boarding school and married off at age 17 to an odious social-climbing doctor half her height and twice her age. She cuckolded John Eliot fairly quickly, thanks to her alluring beauty and the attentions of debauched gallant Lord Valentia. And she made an equally swift passage from shunned divorce to fashionable lady (subject of several remarkable Gainsborough portraits) in both London and Paris. Lord Cholmondeley was her patron for several years, followed by Philippe, duc d'Orleans, the richest man in France, and then the Prince of Wales. Prinny, as the future George IV was known, may or may not have sired Elliott's daughter Georgiana, but he ensured the girl's care for the rest of her life. The intrepid Englishwoman's finest hour occurred during the French Revolution. Openly loyalist, she probably smuggled letters for Marie-Antoinette. She was imprisoned and nearly guillotined for consorting with the turncoat Orleans. Manning exuberantly accompanies her account of these personages and their high-jinks with numerous, gleeful sidebars about topics such as birth control methods, scandal-mongering newspapers,the ascension of Madame Guillotine and the pronunciation of British upper-class names. My Lady will appeal to amateur historians and loyal followers of the current Prince Charles, to whom the author refers frequently. Some intriguing historical tidbits, delivered with gushing language and a gossipy tone.

Harriet Klausner
This combination biography and autobiography enables Georgian and Regency readers especially of romance to gain deep insight into an interesting era of manners that today seem contradictory yet perfectly acceptable. Fans of the period will see the era through the eyes of one of the more renowned courtesans Grace Dalrymple Elliot, whose memoir was filmed by Eric Roemer (The Lady and the Duke). Her insight into royalty and other members of the aristocracy is enhanced by sidebars from noted Regency author Jo Manning. Easy to read with its pick up and put down style and quite entertaining, MY LADY SCANDALOUS will elate the sub-genre audience by living up to its subtitle and providing a deep look at the outrageous life of a royal courtesan during a time of decadence and hedonism. This excellent biography is worth the time needed by the audience to absorb the details as there is so much here that bears rereading and applies so brilliantly to the novels set in this period.

The Washington Times, Sunday, October 2, 2005, byline: By Muriel Dobbin
    This book will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about an 18th-century courtesan, and then some. It rambles from tidbits to tedium with family chronologies sandwiched between accounts of the life and times of courtesans whom Ms. Manning refuses to brand as whores, perhaps because a going rate for a street woman was ninepence (about a dime) and those climbing in and out of the beds of peers could command close to a million dollars a year in today's money.
    Her "Lady Scandalous," Grace Dalrymple, is an example of the more refined species, a Scotswoman with a complexion "clear as the clouds of a May morning," according to Ms. Manning who writes in the florid language of the romance novelist she is when she isn't offering up chunks of research. At 17, the lovely Dalrymple married a dull doctor more than twice her age, and after a sordid divorce, galloped through a series of lovers ranging from rogues to peers of the realm - often one and the same - including the Prince of Wales, who may or may not have fathered her child.
    Ms. Manning makes an interesting sociological point when she suggests that the fact that Grace was not an aristocrat handicapped her longterm success as a courtesan. As the author analyzes the situation, "Although aristocratic women could be tramps before as well as during marriage, young women from a lower stratum of society could not afford to fool around." In other words, the farther up the social ladder you were, the more of a tramp you could be.
    Ms. Manning is at her most interesting when she delineates the life-style of the courtesan whom she compares without compassion to the whore, although it could be argued that it was no more than a matter of common denominator. She draws a rather brutal parallel between the Regency cads and modern "love rats" like James Hewitt, who demonstrated the terrible taste in men of the late Princess Diana by a postmortem betrayal in a book that nobody could contradict.
    Recalling that scandal riddled the history of Diana Spencer's family, Ms. Manning offers a gratuitous slap. "How puzzling that she (Princess Diana) seemed to be so clueless as to why Prince Charles was marrying her. She had her family's history to guide and warn her."
    The author chronicles the misery of street whores by comparison with their upper class sisters in a grim glossary including the "posture moll" skilled in flagellation, the "half-timers" who were married women who walked the streets occasionally for household money, and also reveals that "nunneries" meant brothels. Grace Dalrymple, she emphasizes, was not a prostitute but a "sophisticated, cultured woman who selected her lovers at the pinnacle of society." Nevertheless, the courtesan's day - "after a long night of partying, she would rise at noon in her love nest, and drink her morning chocolate, have her hair dressed, and eagerly read the latest on-dits in the Morning Chronicle" - was supported by her wealthy married lover for only as long as he or his successors chose.
    It was, as biographer I.M. Davis put it, "the world of high harlotry" as opposed to the world of street harlotry where the women were less glamorous, less fortunate and less lucky. Courtesans provided sexual favors in return for generous compensation which could probably be said of any high class 21st-century callgirl, reinforcing the French theory that the more things change, the more they remain the same.
    According to Ms. Manning, those at the "high end" of the courtesan "sisterhood" were remunerated at what was for those times a princely rate in today's dollar terms, ranging from $405,000 to $810,000 a year while they were in their prime. The author assesses the situation accurately when she concludes, "Love, lust, beauty faded: money retained its values."
    What made Grace Dalrymple different was that she lived in an era when her beauty bought her everything, and took her to the inevitable point when the demise of assorted lovers sent her plunging into genteel poverty and a dismal demise. Yet she played a part in history by writing a memoir about her presence and participation in the bloody years of the French Revolution, when she narrowly escaped execution as a British royalist. There was most likely far more to Grace Dalrymple than she was ever permitted to demonstrate and perhaps that was the real difference between the women who walked the streets and those who climbed in and out of the beds of the rich.
    Yet perhaps Grace had the last laugh. She became the topic of a recent movie "The Lady and the Duke" about her romance with the Duc de Chartres, the wealthiest man in France, who ultimately fell victim to the revolutionaries. Moreover, Gainsborough's paintings of Dalrymple still hang not only in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but also in other prominent galleries. It is unfortunate that the book leaves the reader still curious about a woman as resilient and intelligent as she was beautiful in an age when only her beauty mattered. Even in her biography, the real Grace Dalrymple never seems to stand up.

Louisiana Book News, 9 April 2006, byline: Cheré Coen

Manning's 'Lady'

Jo Manning of Miami, author of the delicious My Lady Scandalous (Simon & Schuster, $25), recently found herself doing a booksigning with a New Orleans actress. Francine Segal, who teaches drama at Loyola and has appeared in films such as Monster's Ball and last year's TV movie Snow Wonder, decided to adapt the subject of Manning's biography at a Florida booksigning.

Manning's book deals with Grace Dalrymple Elliott, a convent-schooled, middle class girl who became one of the most sought-after courtesans of late 18th century London.

"What she did was to adapt my day-in-the-life-of-a-courtesan from My Lady Scandalous," Manning said. "She introduced me, I gave the background on courtesans in England in the 18th century, and then she went into her monologue. She was wonderfully wicked; did amazing things with a fan."

Segal is a regular actress of Tennessee Williams' plays, so her fan dance can be easily imagined.