Laetitia Horsepole is a delight and a refreshment for the mind. The memoirs record the long and variegated life (1730-182?) of Laetitia Horsepole, Admiralty portraitist, Royal Academician, colour theorist, conversational wit, sexual adventuress and confidante of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). The memoirs were written near the end of her life when the accumulated burdens of extreme old age and a bone tumour resulting from a leg injury inflicted by her first husband had reduced her to a state of dependence on her two remaining servants, Angelo and Maria. It is possible that Angelo administered poison and killed her. She suspected he might do so. The final page of her memoirs refer to his excruciating headaches and strange dreams, prognosticating a pursuit to the death of some unnamed quarry.

Laetitia’s memoirs were written at the insistence of Shelley, who knew her in her final years when she was a memorable, paint-spattered grotesque in her ruined Genoan palazzo, still painting surreal landscapes and a visionary portrait of herself. The manuscript, long concealed in a hidden compartment of an antique Venetian cupboard, was discovered in 1997. It was published in this edition in 2001 in a version edited with a light hand by John Fuller, a Fellow of Magdalen College.

The memoirs fall naturally into five parts that recount her five tempestuous marriages. Fuller calls them ‘five acts of a drama’. Taken in sequence they provide a conspectus of human sexuality, from the perfunctory brutality of the first of her husbands to the desperately imaginative incapacity of the last. It is a curious anachronism that the most enjoyable of these sexual partnerships was shared with her Madagascan prince, Ramboasalama, whose caresses anticipated the feminist recommendations of William Chidley (186?-1916) the Australian philosopher of sexology, who was gaoled for his public advocacy of non-penetrative sexual intercourse.

Laetitia’s first husband, a well-born wastrel, drowned himself. Her second, Captain James Horsepole of the Royal Navy, fell in love with her when he commissioned her to paint his portrait. He was a stout, reliable man and they contracted a happy marriage of convenience that ended unexpectedly. Horsepole was posted to India. Laetitia chose to accompany him and they left England in leaking ship that eventually ran aground in Madagascar where both contracted malaria. Horsepole succumbed but Laetitia, sole survivor of the ship’s company on the island, was nursed back to health by the Merina, as the native Madagascans were known, after weeks of delirium. When her fever abated she married according to the local custom, Prince Ramboasalama, son of the King of Madagascar. In the idyllic months that followed her marriage to the Prince, Laetitia recorded over 300 of the Island’s orchids in pencil drawings now unfortunately lost and made an expedition to find the legendary Elephant Bird or Rukh. Her Madagascar idyll ended abruptly when she was captured by a British privateer and brought back to England. After her return she resumed her career as a portraitist, campaigned against-slavery and enjoyed a period of celebrity as a consequence of her Madagascan adventures. Tiring of these diversions she married again in a nostalgic love match with her original drawing master, Luigi Canistrello (1711-1798), illustrator, architect and friend of Count Chiavari, who commissioned him to renovate his palazzo in Genoa. Canistrello lasted no longer than his predecessors in Laetitia’s favours. He died as a consequence of falling from a scaffold while supervising the Genoan renovations. The Count, a libertine by then in a state of advanced debility, comforted Laetitia in her loss and enlisted her as his mistress of ceremonies in a vain pursuit of sexual pleasures with his servants. Their collaboration ripened to marriage and he expired in due course, leaving Laetitia in possession of his estates.

It is, however, Laetitia’s conversations with her contemporaries, rather than the veiled obscurities of her bedroom adventures that provide the recurring delights of her memoirs: Coleridge; ‘whose Mind is as the Summer Lightning’ compared to Wordsworth’s ;November Fogs’; Canistrello, who persuaded her of the general decay of taste in English painting and Samuel Johnson, who supplied an ‘Etymology of my pencill’. Letitia’s portrait of Johnson hangs, appropriately, in the Garrick Club in London.

John Fuller’s editorial presence is never intrusive. Footnotes are informative when necessary and mercifully sparse. Three Appendices relate the disappointingly few traces she left in the records of her contemporaries. There are a couple of mentions of Laetitia in diaries of those who knew her, a poem written for her by Jonathan Swift when she was a child in Ireland and he was in his dotage, and cancelled stanzas from Shelley’s fantasy, ‘The Witch of Atlas’, that may reflect their visionary conversations. It is one of the poignant ironies of an almost forgotten life that once blazed so brightly that Shelley probably never read the memoirs she addressed to him.

'Requiescat in Pace Laetitia, Equus Molem Construunt' ( )

Five Husbands. Five Fishs. A sign that a Multitude hungry for Truth may be fed from such a Life, were it to be written down, & were to be, as mine has been, a Life in itself eager to find that Truth.
Five Husbands. Five acts of a Drama. A Sequence of Adventures and Resolutions with some Thing at the Core most unhusbandlike - Innocence, Institutions, Inquisition, Injustice, Inspiration, which to call it thus were a pretty Play on its Heroine who must be called first upon the Scene.

The Way Laetitia capitalises all the Nouns makes it really hard to read her Book. I gave up at about the 10% Point because I couldn't get into it at all.