Becoming Lola was the first novel I published and I’ll always feel a great affection for it. It’s a novelised account of the life of the notorious Victorian adventuress, Lola Montez. I first came across her when I saw her striking portrait in the former royal palace of the kings of Bavaria, the Nymphenburg Palace n Munich. The description on the wall beside the painting said simply, “Lola Montez, dancer”. I was intrigued and wanted to find out more. In the pre-Google days, this entailed a lot of hunting around in libraries and ordering books, but the effort proved well worthwhile, for the story I uncovered was such an extraordinary one.
Born in 1821 into modest circumstances, at the age of sixteen Lola, whose name was really Eliza Gilbert, ruined herself in the eyes of polite society when, to avoid an abhorrent arranged marriage, she ran away with one of her mother’s admirers. He married her, but she abandoned any chance of forgiveness when she refused to be trapped in an unhappy union and left him.
Most women would have vanished into increasingly desperate obscurity, but Lola was no ordinary woman. Gifted with a mixture of beauty, intelligence and sheer grit, she rose to become, for a decades, the most famous woman in the world after Queen Victoria. The story of how she did it ranges from the exotic lands of India to the rough-and-ready Australian Outback, taking in the glittering courts of Europe, where Lola was for a time the mistress of King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who gave up his crown for her; the razzmatazz of New York’s Broadway, and the California goldfields on the way. This true story of a remarkable woman fascinated me and I’m delighted to say that many readers who like to discover history’s less travelled roads have told me they really enjoyed learning about her, even though they didn’t always like her!
Contemporary cartoons satirizing Lola’s affair with Ludwig I of Bavaria and her bigamous marriage to a rich but naive young army officer, George Heald.