Harriette Wilson was a Regency courtesan and her Memoirs (1825) has one of the best opening lines ever: ‘I shall not say why and how I became, at the age of fifteen, the mistress of the Earl of Craven’. Her first glimpse of Lord Byron, described by his ex-lover Lady Caroline Lamb as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous to know’, was at a masquerade. Harriette wandered into a ‘quiet room’ which was ‘entirely deserted, save by one solitary individual. . . his bright penetrating eyes seemed earnestly fixed, I could not discover on what. “Surely he sees beyond this gay scene into some other world, which is hidden from the rest of mankind”, thought I, being impressed, for the first time in my life, with an idea that I was in the presence of a supernatural being. His attitude was graceful in the extreme. His whole countenance so bright, severe, and beautiful, that I should have been afraid to love him’.
Harriette watched the beautiful stranger for another ‘ten minutes’ (it was a quiet room) before asking him ‘I entreat you to gratify my curiosity. Who and what are you, who appear to me a being too bright and too severe to dwell among us?’
A startled Byron (who had previously turned down an invitation to meet Harriette) replied that he was merely a ‘very stupid masquerade-companion’ and tried to escape, but Harriette was not letting him off so easily, telling him ‘you must be Lord Byron, whom I have never seen’. ‘And you’. said Byron, ‘are Harriette Wilson’. They then had a pleasant time discussing beauty: ‘Your beauty is all intellectual’ she told him – and criticising Lady Caroline Lamb – ‘Is there any sort of comparison to be made between you and that mad woman?” he told her, and they parted with mutual admiration. BYRON: ‘Wherever I am, it will console me to know that I am remembered kindly by you’, HARRIETTE: ‘God bless you, dear Lord Byron.’
Walter Scott described Harriette as a ‘smart, saucy girl’, which is how most people think of her. What gets missed is that she was a fine writer with an eye for the ridiculous. The encounter with Byron reads very like a parody of romantic fiction, a clever send-up of the Byronic hero, a persona assiduously cultivated by Byron himself. She describes Byron as if he were a character in a fashionable novel, a character that was to become one of the great fictional stereotypes: the dark, moody stranger waiting for the love of a good woman. . .
What Happened Next
A small packet of Harriette’s letters to Byron were found in the 20th century, one with this charming request: ‘ I hate to ask you for money. . . However, I only require a little present aid, and that I am sure you will not refuse me, as you once refused to make my acquaintance because you held me too cheap’. No letters from him to her survive. Byron left England for good in 1816, and died in Missolonghi in 1824, preparing to fight for Greek independence. Harriette died in rich obscurity around 1845. Her memoirs may have earned her in excess of £10,000. Some men paid to be kept out. The Duke of Wellington’s reported response to Harriette’s publisher, however, ‘Publish and be damned’, is apocryphal.