DEFIANCE: The Life and Choices of Lady Anne Barnard

'An eccentric life, wonderfully told. Lady Anne Barnard was a brave traveller, artist and observer. Stephen Taylor brings her brilliantly out of the shadows.' - Stella Tillyard. Right to the last months of her life, Lady Anne Barnard stayed tied to her desk in Berkeley Square, London. Piled on shelves stood letters, journals, memoirs, diaries, poems, sketches and watercolours, her 'scraps'. Lady Anne was a woman who could 'change a dull party into an agreeable one...make the dullest speak, the shyest feel happy and the witty flash fire.' She mixed as easy with the lowly as the highborn, with servants as well as aristocrats and royalty, intimate friends with London's oddest couple, the Prince of Wales and his secret wife, Maria Fitzherbert. Lady Anne Barnard lived at the heart of Georgian society, yet was never fully part of it. She was as an eccentric and outsider, but what defined this poet and musician, artist and hostess? It was a defiance of convention. She rejected numerous suitors, lived independently by buying and renting houses, and travelled to France to observe the Revolution. When she did marry, it was to a junior army officer, 12 years younger than she, and together they withdrew to Africa. Her curious ways attracted gossip right into her final years when she raised an illegitimate child at her home in Berkeley Square. She was a mysterious young girl of African origin whom Anne called 'my protégée of a darker complexion.' Anne's verse was celebrated by Walter Scott, and she was also a brilliant and indefatigable diarist. Stephen Taylor has been given access to her private papers, notably six volumes of memoirs which have never been published, and proves that she is one of the most unheralded chroniclers of her time. Broadminded, witty, unashamedly egalitarian and romantic, here is a woman of huge courage, talent and warmth who speaks to us across the centuries. 388pp, artistic illustrations plus eight pages of colour and other photos.