The Child Bride and The Spanish Dancer

My name is Lola Montez. That is the first lie I will tell you, and the smallest.

There used to be a girl called Eliza Gilbert. She was Irish, plain, and no one wanted her so her mother sold her to an aged Judge. I killed her on a ship somewhere between London and Calcutta.

There used to be a wife called Mrs James. She was loved, until she became a piece of furniture that you trip over on the way to somewhere more important. She died on the way back to London.

The woman in the mirror now has black hair, Spanish eyes, and a past she assembled from pieces like the costume she’s wearing. Underneath, if you peel it all back, the accent, the name, the legend there is still Eliza and Mrs James. But nobody wants to see those women dance.

I have gone by four names, married three men, bared my breasts for a king, and toppled a government. I have been chased from more countries than most people will visit. None of it was supposed to happen and none of it was my fault.

When I die, and I know already that it will be soon, and ugly, and alone, they will write about the dancer. The seductress. The scandal. The woman with the black hair and Spanish eyes. They will not write about the girl who stood on the deck of a ship at sixteen and decided that if the world would not have Eliza Gilbert, she would give them someone they couldn’t refuse.

Well, if they won’t write about her then I will.
- Lola Montez

Eliza Gilbert was sixteen when her mother put her on a ship to India and sold her to a sixty-three-year-old judge. She was supposed to be grateful. She was supposed to sit in his drawing room and play piano and produce children and disappear, quietly, into the colonial machinery that consumed women like fuel. She did not do any of these things. Instead, she ran off with a lieutenant, destroyed her reputation before she'd turned twenty, and began the long, reckless, extraordinary process of becoming someone else entirely.

The someone else was Lola Montez. A Spanish dancer from Seville who never existed until Eliza invented her. Lola danced her way across Europe, took Franz Liszt as a lover, walked into the court of King Ludwig I of Bavaria and didn't leave until the government fell and the king abdicated. She crossed America on horseback, horsewhipped editors who wrote about her, and lived more lives in forty years than most people manage in a century. She was the most famous woman of the nineteenth century. Almost everything the public knew about her was a lie.

This novel tells the story from the inside. Not the legend, not the scandal sheets, not the version told by the men she left behind. This is Eliza's account, in her own voice: funny, furious, unapologetic, and uncomfortably honest about the cost of becoming the most dangerous woman in Europe.