The Memoirs of Harriette Wilson, Volumes One and Two: Written by Herself

She was the most famous woman in Regency London who wasn't a queen. Harriette Wilson kept company with dukes and poets, dined with statesmen, and held court at the opera where young men vied for her attention. She wrote these memoirs in middle age, when her star had fallen, and she made no apologies for a single one of her choices. The result reads like the ultimate act of revenge disguised as literature: Wilson warned her two hundred former lovers that she would publish their names, then published anyway. The memoir offers intimate, often hilarious portraits of the Regency demimonde, written by a woman who understood exactly how much power desire and discretion could buy. She refuses to perform shame. This is a book about power, about pleasure, and about the particular freedom of having nothing left to lose. It endures because it remains utterly unrepentant, because Wilson writes with a wit that still cuts across two centuries, and because it offers a rare glimpse into a world that usually kept its secrets.