A sexy summer craze has swept the world of books: three publishers have brought out biographies of courtesans, top-class prostitutes of the 18th and 19th centuries whose skills and ambition earned them the patronage of powerful men. It seems that even when reading history, there are few places we would rather be than in the bedroom.
These new books are polished and informative. Virginia Rounding, in Les Grandes Horizontales, although sympathetic, is clear-eyed about the exploitation and dishonesty that characterised such lives. Frances Wilson's The Courtesan's Revenge is published today - and the kiss-and-tell memoirs of its subject, Harriette Wilson, have been reissued. Both Wilson and Katie Hickman, author of Courtesans, adopt a more celebratory tone than Rounding. But the argument of all three books is that these women were more important and interesting than has previously been thought.
Much is made of the fact that they "chose" their lovers, and of their power as consumers. Harriette Wilson, who used her memoirs to blackmail her clients, is said to have brought the establishment to its knees, while Hickman, who goes furthest in her portrayal of the courtesans as proto-feminist heroines, offers up Cora Pearl as an avatar of sexual liberation: "My independence was all my fortune: I have known no other happiness."
In her bestselling Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire, Amanda Foreman argued that while political historians tend to ignore women, feminists have portrayed them as "passive victims", so that stories such as Georgiana's had not been told. By researching the working lives of courtesans, these young writers pick up the thread. Arguing that sexual double standards illuminate their times and that courtesans played a more active role than has been recognised, they borrow the tools of three decades of women's studies. And in the moneyed but illicit realm in which the courtesans thrived, they have found a classic of the type of ambivalent, marginal space that cultural theory has made so fashionable.
The biographer's preference for the rich and glamorous can always be explained by the fact that they left more information behind. And one risks sounding like a joyless prude by complaining of a surfeit of shopping and sex. Nonetheless, something feels wrong. If 1970s feminism was blamed for ruining women's ability to enjoy being girls, to have fun with clothes and make-up and feel free to be themselves, these lipstick feminists of popular history have forgotten something else. It's as if, in their enthusiasm for matters of dress and pride in the courtesans' erotic triumphs, there is no room for the anger or sadness that surely belong in these books: for Cora Pearl, who claimed to have been raped as a child and "preserved an instinctive hatred against men"; for Marie Duplessis, probably sold by her father; for laudanum addict Sophia Baddely. Never mind the grotesque social and sexual inequality that left these women so few options in the first place.
Biography is not an end in itself. The point of life stories is to deepen our understanding of the past, and the best books change the way we see things. After reading Claire Tomalin's wonderful life of Dora Jordan, actress and mistress of the Duke of Clarence, it was impossible to look at Gillray's cartoon, the Crack'd Jordan, showing a broken chamber pot (a jordan) and a man disappearing inside it, without feeling indignant at the artist's misogyny.
Likewise, Susan Sontag stirred up our sense of injustice when, in her novel The Volcano Lover, she described how Emma Hamilton, the love of Nelson's life, ended her days, as did Dora Jordan and Harriette Wilson, penniless in France.
Part of the problem with the courtesans is that, unlike Mrs Jordan, they left very few letters behind, while Wilson's memoirs were written for a sensation-seeking public. But what starts as an honest attempt to give them their voices back ends up as a patchwork of reflected impressions, all surface and no depth.
Rounding deals with this by making her book a study of the legends as well as the lives. And perhaps there is more to these stories than meets the eye: Anna Clark promises to show in a forthcoming book how the 18th-century sex scandals played a part in the evolution of democratic politics in Britain. But while the books pages sparkle with anecdotes about how Cora Pearl served herself up naked on a platter, or appeared on stage dressed only in diamonds, it becomes more difficult to remember that women are and always have been good for so much more than bed.
Susanna Rustin is deputy editor of the Guardian's Saturday Review
susanna.rustin@guardian. co.uk
