Who was Mistress Glory?
Illegitimate daughter of a debauched nobleman; ragged pickpocket of the slums; wife of a titled wastrel; insatiable paramour of men of low estate and high. But finally and forever she was a slave to the lust of Innocent Paradine, king of highwaymen, the man who had fiercely claimed her virgin body, who followed her passionate career with vengeful jealousy and who fathered her only child when she fled from the salons of the West
End to become half a legend in the stews and bagnios of the London underworld.
Here is the colorful, strife-torn world of England in the early 19th century, from the dissolute court of Carleton
House to the orgy of a prostitute’s wedding in Cheapside.
Here is the story of a beautiful woman who rose from squalor to become the most talked-of figure of her day.
Susan Morley is a young Englishwoman, an actress on the BBC, and the wife of a well-known author. She is also the mother of three children. Mistress Glory, her first historical novel, was published in 1948 by the Dial Press.
-It was a name and a description. Conceived in the strange aftermath of a wedding in the London slums, born in a brothel, raised among pickpockets and bawds, Glory Webster grew to a ripe, pulsing beauty that was destined to inflame the lust of many men.
There was Innocent Paradine, the highwayman with a devil’s face, whose convulsive passion plunged her being into first knowledge of the pain and delight of love. Hugo Faulkland, whose hot kisses brought the fleeting illusion of security. Richard St. George, the provider of peace and comfort; Job Glaisher, a common laborer whose caresses had a tender force that Glory had never known before. She gave love, with blind surrender to sensual pleasure; she took love, with cold calculation, to reach the bed of the Prince of Wales, to achieve an undreamed-of, but precarious power in a debauched court.
This is not only the story of a woman, but an ad- venturous tale of England in a gusty, exciting age. Susan Morley writes of a duel, a riot in Drury Lane
Theatre, a cutthroat’s escape from Dorchester prison, a boldly-executed robbery, with compelling range and sweep. This narrative of the incomparable Glory Webster, her life and times, is story-telling at its best.
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