Among my many favorite things, (which include bacon fries, anything Mark Gatiss has ever done, the word ‘phantasmagoria’ and theme parks, to name but a few) one that ranks rather highly is stories about eccentric, unconventional and often brazen women who happily disregarded what was socially acceptable for their gender in the times they lived in and as a result, led totally badass lives. Bohemian muse Kiki de Montparnasse, aristocratic lunatic Marchesa Luisa Casati and the ferocious Tura Satana all fall into this category for me, with each of their life stories making for thrilling reading. (Look them up if you’re not familiar, you won’t be disappointed.) Only recently I’ve come across another woman who now joins my canon of kickass ladies, and what has me extra excited about this bird is that despite the seemingly exotic name, she’s IRISH! 
Lola Montez was a notorious Victorian femme fatale. A dancer, actress, courtesan and eventual Countess, who blazed her way through Europe, Australia, America and more than her fair share of lovers (including Alexandre Dumas and Chopin), causing scandal and outrage wherever she went.
Born Eliza Gilbert, it’s unclear whether her place of origin was Limerick or Sligo in 1818 or 1821. She was raised in India and sent to be educated in Scotland and England in an effort to curb her spoilt and tempestuous nature. However, Eliza’s wild tendencies showed no signs of abating, as she was prone to mischief like running through the streets naked on one occasion, sticking flowers into an elderly man’s wig during mass on another and was known as a “queer, wayward little Indian girl”. When she was sixteen, Eliza eloped with an army officer that her mother fancied, but the couple separated five years later.
Having to make her own way in the world, she reinvented herself entirely as Lola Montez, a Spanish dancer and made her debut in London. The reviews were unfavourable to say the least, but as undeterred as a delusional X Factor contestant, the newly-named Lola took her showgirl antics to mainland Europe, convinced that London audiences just didn’t get her. Her signature act was the “Spider Dance”, which either involved shaking rubber tarantulas out of her clothing, providing cheeky glimpses of her body, or her pretending there were spiders crawling on her and removing clothes in an effort to shake them off. Either way it involved the punters getting a good look at all of Lola, as it was really a sort of early burlesque act. Her fame steadily grew, although it was mostly based on the fact that she was heartbreakingly gorgeous and had a violent temper, rather than her dancing. Lola kept things interesting with a string of affairs and the occasional spell as a wealthy man’s mistress as she flitted around Europe. Her aforementioned temper has become the stuff of legend, stories abound of her carrying a whip everywhere she went, like a sexed-up, slightly unhinged Indiana Jones and using it to strike men across the face if they annoyed her. In essence, you didn’t fuck with Lola Montez.
She took a shine to and relentlessly pursued composer Franz Liszt while in Dresden, but he was none too impressed with Lola’s jealousy over the attention her intended beau received from his admirers. To upstage Liszt, she crashed a banquet he was holding for royalty and proceeded to dance across the tables, causing uproar when she kicked a bowl of soup into an attending duke’s lap. Having had more than enough of this troublesome woman, Liszt locked her into a hotel room while she slept and promptly legged it, leaving a wad of cash at the front desk to compensate for the furniture she would inevitably smash to pieces when she awoke to discover his desertion.
However, Lola’s exploits up to now were nothing compared to the shenanigans that followed. While she was performing in Munich, the reigning King Ludwig fell madly, helplessly in love with her. Apparently the story of how they met is most likely untrue, given Lola’s fast and loose relationship with the truth, but I’m going to tell you anyway, because it’s a brilliant anecdote. After her first performance in the city, the theatre manager fired her on the spot, claiming her dancing was appalling. Enraged, (as she seemed to be most of the time) Lola decided to storm into the King’s palace in order to appeal to him directly for justice, barging into his private study while still in costume. The flustered king, at a loss for what to say, enquired as to whether her comely figure was “a work of nature or of art”, which makes him sound like quite the creepy old man. In response, she grabbed a pair of scissors from his desk and slashed her dress to the waist, revealing her killer rack to be all Lola. Whether or not that was the truth of it, what definitely did happen was that King Ludwig made her his mistress, gave her an allowance, built her a small palace, had her foot sculpted in marble, her portrait painted and infuriated the Bavarian nobility by making her a Countess. It didn’t take long for Lola to use her influence on the aging king, essentially ruling Bavaria for him and defiantly directing the political system towards liberalism, which made her more than a few enemies, as conservatism was how Bavaria rolled at the time. Riots broke out and pressure was mounting as political unrest and a revolutionary movement were gathering momentum. The people of Bavaria were uniting against Lola and her meddling with their once popular king. In 1848, Ludwig was forced to abdicate and Lola skipped town on the first midnight train out of there.
Back in London and not one to waste time, Lola married a young guardsman, only to find herself arrested for bigamy, thanks to her new husband’s scandalized aunt who knew all about Lola’s past, as her outrageous antics had become a regular feature of gossip columns. The couple fled the country to escape the charges but after two years the relationship had fallen apart and Lola was alone again. In order to make a fresh start (seeing as she was now infamous in Victorian society across Europe), she set off to gold rush-gripped California, married a newspaperman and opened a frontier saloon where she entertained the boisterous gold miners with her risqué dancing and kept a pet grizzly bear. That’s right, a pet grizzly bear. However that particular marriage failed too, and the irrepressible Lola took off to Australia where she toured the country, shocking the locals with her brazen Spider Dance, giving lectures about her beauty secrets and at one point, in typical Lola style, attacked a newspaper editor with her trusty whip, as his paper had the cheek to give her a bad review.
When Lola decided that she had had enough of Australia, she returned to America and resided in New York where she acted for a while. In a seemingly uncharacteristic move, she took to counselling troubled women and helping out in women’s prisons and asylums until she suffered a stroke in 1861 and never quite fully recovered. A year later she contracted pneumonia while out for a walk and at the still young age of somewhere between 39 and 42 (like any good international woman of mystery, she constantly lied about her age), the hell-raising firecracker that was Lola Montez, died.
A sad ending to a tremendously colourful life, but since her death, Lola has been the inspiration for countless characters in film and literature, has a lake AND a mountain named after her in California (which is pretty awesome whatever way you look at it) and is believed to have been the reason for the phrase “Whatever Lola wants, Lola gets”, which is none too shabby a legacy to leave behind.
Kitty is a graphic designer living in Dublin. She has a fondness for Pop Tarts and will one day learn all the words to “Regulate”. She can be found blogging about all manner of nonsense over on www.redlemonade.blogspot.com and on Twitter as @redlemonader
I have never heard of this woman before today – what a kick ass lady! I’ll be sharing her story with all of my female friends. I especially love that she had a whip & wasn’t afraid to use it, now that’s a role model for women, thanks for the post.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LnYLF_E1NU
Nice read, you probably already know this, but Lola pops up in the title track of Joanna Newsom’s latest album! She even played the song at her recent gig in Marley Park. She talks about her a bit in this Nardwuar interviiew: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Citr–NardwuarTheHumanServiettePresents/~3/XcqlzMJeyns/20101001-153528-to-20101001-171808.mp3
hey Kitty Cat, did you see the story in the paper about Nancy Wake, the White Mouse?
also, you should read Anne Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lunch, about another phenomenal 19th century Irish woman.
argh, The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch. Freudian slip (I was thinking of cheese sandwiches).
Casati! I highly recommend Infinite Variety, if anyone wants to read about her decadent parties in Venice and dozens of exotic pets.
Another woman I love to read about but who probably would have been less fun to know is Tallulah Bankhead – lots of biographies out there, and though most likely many of the anecdotes are made up (like many of Casati’s) they are ENDLESSLY entertaining.
Oh, and I’d love to know if the film about Montez (Lola Montés, i think?) is worth tracking down if anyone has seen it before?
There is a large information plaque about her in Ballyhoura, Co. Limerick – she has very strong ties with the family who lived in the castle there.
Maybe it’s my advanced years but what we used to call ‘bold ladies’ have never excited me. I am somewhat bemused to see a younger generation descovering Lola and Eliza for the first time. Yes they were fascinating but I don’t think we would have admired them. They would have scared the living daylights out of us mousy folks. They remind me of that bold girl we all secretly disliked at school but were afraid to admit it. She was often bordering on the bully also.
Am I alone in loathing Maud Gonne, another bold lady? J.M.Synge could not stand her. He thought her a liar. A poser she certainly was. How about Lady Lavery? There was another scary lassie. She thought her daughter’s husband ( a Kilkenny farmer) was beneath her. Her own father had started out as a messenger boy in the Chicago stockyards. The disappearance of her snobby dial from the watermark was the main reason I welcomed the euro.
Being ‘wild’ is now fashionable. Sometimes the ‘wild’ people can cause great pain to others. This could be a reflection of the moral relativism of the times, the same ingredient which we witnessed in the English riots.
Women who have been all their lives good, loyal and giving to those around them are now despised as weak and boring. They get no credit, no compensation and no memorial statues are erected to them. Our mothers and grandmothers, who coped in tougher times, are unsung. Lets hear it for the good girls .
Why does it have to be one or the other? Why can’t I admire women who coped with the strictures of the time by sticking two fingers up at the world and going well outside convention, and those who found their places within the family and community and worked there? I think loads and loads of people admire women who were “good girls”. My grandma is 96 and quite definitely one of the good girls, and I admire the hell out her.
But don’t forget, some of the women who stuck to convention hurt other people too – my mum remembers not being allowed to play with a little girl at her school because the little girl’s mother was divorced, and my grandma thought that made her unsuitable as a playmate. Conventional doesn’t always mean as compassionate as you could be, just as wild doesn’t necessarily mean lacking compassion.
Admiring one doesn’t have to mean denigrating the other, and I don’t think admiring anyone means you have to think everything they did was perfect.
Wowser! What a woman and likewise, haven’t heard of her before. We need to dig up the history roots before some of these awesome Irish ladies are absorbed into oblivion for good. It’d be great to read a series outlining their lives & achievements.
There isnot a chance in the world of Lola and her likes being ‘absobed into oblivion’. She has been ubiquitous for most of my lifetime. Why are people acting like she is some new discovery who has been all but forgotten? Books, radio programmes, references in biogs and history books. She has been everywhere.
I think she was the victorian equivalent of the young, glamorous, gold digging, trophy wives of aging billionaires whom we see in ‘Hello’. She was sent abroad to be educated. That sounds like privilege to me. She certainly blew it. Courtesan, I always understood, is a euphemism for prostitute. I find it distressing that someone above has described her as a role model. Have we nothing better? As a first generation feminist who read her Betty Friedan in 1972 I protest. Lola Montez is as far as you can get from a feminist role model. Sad.
I’m with Mairead on this. I certainly wouldn’t want to fashion myself after a role model who strips for a living, and goes from one man to the next without coming up for air in between (using a whip on them doesn’t negate her dependence on them). That we see this as a mark of feminism or independence and something to be admired just confirms for me that feminism has largely lost its way.
Thanks for all the comments and reading reccommendations everybody, I’m delighted that so many of you enjoyed the post.
@Mairead & Maire – To be fair to Lola, Victorian society didn’t exactly offer much choice to women outside marriage and having children so I admire the fact that she went out and did her own thing, pleasing herself rather than society. While it’s true that she seems to habitually pop up in books, films and songs, I had never heard of her until around two weeks ago, and it would seem I’m not alone in that.
Had never heard of of the lady before this. She sounds like she would be one of these wans where when you see her coming you’d say, “fucking lola is coming” and try to hide, and she’d turn up in the big brother house if she were alive now. Still though interesting lady.
The claim that Lola Montez “ruled Bavaria” is a problematic one, not least for the fact that the only source for such a claim is … erm, herself. And the notion that she “”direct[ed] the political system towards liberalism” is laughable. A recent – and as far as I can tell, well researched – bio by James Morton characterises the situation thus: Lola pestered Ludwig for a title, which she eventually got; she pressured him to favour people she liked and penalise those she didn’t; her political involvement chiefly consisted of employing a student fraternity to spy on her perceived enemies (Jesuits, mostly); she had affairs with several men while living with Ludwig, including (allegedly) his illegitimate son. None of this helped Ludwig’s popularity at a time of rising anti-monarchical sentiment in Europe – Lola was increasingly seen as an embarrassment and he was increasingly seen as a fool. Following a riot outside her house, she was deported (as opposed to “skipped town on the first midnight train”). Ludwig abdicated some weeks later in favour of his son.
Lola Montez was an opportunist and a self-publicist – nothing more, nothing less. It’s intellectually dishonest and sloppy to represent her as anything else, and I’m surprised to see the headlong rush to do so here (Mairead and Maire’s comments excepted). Call her a bad-ass proto-Tura Satana or wild woman or whatever by all means, but *please* don’t paint her as a feminist role model or a champion of political liberalism!
Lola Montez is mentioned in Isabel Allende’s Daughter of Fortune.
I also heard about her on a tour of Munich.
Has anyone heard of Nellie Cashman?
She was an Irishwoman who emigrated from Cork in 1850. She ran successful businesses such as boarding houses and restaurants during the goldrush in the Yukon and New Mexico and prospected for gold.
She is known as Angel of the Cassiar because she brought food to miners trapped in a remote village in British Comubia. The Canadian army wouldn’t go as the weather was too bad but she set off and saved the lives of 26 men with food and supplies. She tried to help people by setting up a hospital and was a devout Catholic.
Now that’s role model – a successful, independent business woman who still has a sense of compassion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_Cashman