‘Prying into the Recesses of History’: Women Writers and the Court Memoir

Abstract

The court memoir combines autobiographical reflections, royal biography and political history and has an uneasy association with the secret history and roman a clef. The genre has rarely been discussed within studies of women’s life writing, despite fascinating accounts of the Georgian and Regency courts by women writers and important reassessments of women’s contributions to historical writing in recent years.1 This chapter explores the omission of the court memoir within women’s literary history and examines the possibilities for women writers of this hybrid form.2 My focus is on two intersecting memoirs of the Regency court: Lady Charlotte Bury’s Diary Illustrative of the Times of George IV (1838) and (Ellis) Cornelia Knight’s Autobiography of Miss Cornelia Knight, Lady Companion to the Princess Charlotte of Wales (1861). Both women rose to prominence as ladies-in-waiting and published personal accounts of the turbulent marriage of George IV and Queen Caroline, a royal scandal that captured the public imagination throughout the 1810s. Their narratives establish their intimacy with the court, blending portraits of celebrated figures with conversations and correspondence and providing readers with voyeuristic pleasures in the insights into fashions, decor and bons mots. Their life writing reveals the complex negotiations undertaken by the court memoirist, who is implicated in royal intrigue and capitalizes on the publication of scandal.