The Magnificent Mrs Tennant The Adventurous Life of Gertrude Tennant, Victorian Grande Dame David Waller

Gertrude Tennant's life was remarkable for its length (1819-1918), but even more so for the influence she achieved as an unsurpassed London hostess. The salon she established when widowed in her early fifties attracted legions of celebrities, among them Gladstone and Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Thomas Huxley, John Everett Millais, Henry James, and Robert Browning. In her youth she had a fling with Gustave Flaubert, and in her later years she became the redoubtable mother-in-law to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. But as a woman in a male-dominated world, Mrs. Tennant has been remembered mainly as a footnote in the lives of eminent men.

This book recovers the lost life of Gertrude Tennant, drawing on a treasure-trove of recently discovered family papers - thousands of letters, including two dozen original letters from Flaubert to Gertrude, dozens of diaries, and many other unpublished documents relating to Stanley and other famous figures of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. David Waller presents Gertrude Tennant's life in colourful detail, placing her not only at the heart of a multi-generational, matriarchal family epic but also at the centre of European social, literary, and intellectual life for the best part of a century.

David Waller, an author and management consultant, has written two previous books and holds a postgraduate degree in Victorian Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London.

"An absorbing account."—Daily Telegraph

"An excellent biography….putting an impressive woman, who died just before the end of World War I at the age of 99, centre stage."—Victoria Moore, Daily Mail

"It would be hard to imagine a luckier treasure trove than the one revealed to David Waller just four years ago... Letters from Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Millais, Gladstone, Ruskin, Browning, Victor Hugo and... Flaubert... The story of Gertrude Tennant is truly extraordinary... It is a real discovery."—Valerie Grove, The Sunday Times

"A splendid book... a lively, well-researched account... Waller writes exceptionally well, and with a wonderful eye for social detail... The Magnificent Mrs Tennant deserves our attention as a graceful, engaging and meticulous study of a fascinating age."—Miranda Seymour, The Guardian

"Waller's biography... draws upon a hidden attic of material and elegantly recreates a seething, death-haunted century."—Christopher Hawtree, The Independent

"A delight."—Frances Osborne, The Lady

"An excellent biography."—Contemporary Review