A Vindication of Self and Other

Abstract

Grace Dalrymple Elliott’s Journal of my Life during the French Revolution, written around 1801–1802 and posthumously published in 1859, has not previously been discussed by literary scholars despite its intriguing blend of scandal and political history.’ The Journal is at once a self-vindication, a travel narrative, and a memoir of the French Revolution written from the perspective of a courtesan at the heart of events. Elliott’s sexual liaison with the pro-revolutionary, Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orléans shapes the narrative. She attempts to defend the Duke from the taint of regicide in a work that is a vindication of both self and other and writes back to rival histories of the period. She is also involved in a complex balancing act between proximity and distance, as the authority of her account rests on her intimate relationship to the Duke but her royalist identity is dependent on a lack of influence over her former lover. As a courtesan, Elliott appeared alongside Mary Robinson and Elizabeth Fox in the press and her Journal might therefore be included within the tradition of the scandalous memoir as part of a genre which seeks ‘to mend the public and rhetorical image’ of a woman’s character ‘through the revelation of the private’.² However, the Journal does not address Elliott’s early life or sexual fall (other than in a preface written by her editor) and instead focuses solely on her experiences in France during the Revolution from July 1789.