Mary Anne by Daphne Du Maurier
(Published by Virago Press)
Better known for her fiction - of which I am a fan - Du Maurier's Mary Anne is a biography of her great-great-grandmother. Mary Anne was a courtesan, the mistress of Frederick Duke of York, second son of King George III. Du Maurier effortlessly mingles fact and fiction to build a vivid portrait of a woman who would stop at nothing to get what she wanted.
She's an incredible ancestor of the kind we all wish we had lurking in the family tree. Great for history buffs, but the triumph of this book is Du Maurier's page-turning reconstruction of Mary Anne's story.
