Montez is remembered as a proto-feminist and a radical exponent of individualism. Her breaches of decorum - real and imagined - which shocked and thrilled contemporaries are taken as tokens of an anti-conventional attitude pointing towards a philosophy of personal liberation. Contradictorily, her involvement in social welfare for prostitutes in New York is sometimes yoked to a confessional narrative of redemption through in evangelical Christianity while her flighty character is seen as a redeeming trait in a secular-liberal context.
  The account of her life given in the third person in her Lectures and Autobiography of Lola Montez (1858) is sometimes said to have been ghost-written by Rev. C[harles] C[hauncey] Burr - an American journalist and eponym of a well-known modern High School School who acted as her publicity agent and went on to become an opponent of the anti-slavery liberationists such as Harriet Ward Beecher - whom he accused of being in league with the devil on account of the strident rhetoric of their speeches. How far he contributed to the writing or research involved in his lectures is unknown, but the indications are that these were very much her own in conception and expression. Thus her modern biographer Bruce Seymour writes:

 Apparently six lectures - published as Lectures [...] including an Autobiography in New York and in London during 1858 - were planned but only two produced at the first season in Yorkville (NY) during the summer of 1857. These proved enough for the first tour, though others were shortly added. In scope and style, each oration, as the series as a wholedisplays a synoptic knowledge of history and literature which comes as a surprise in a woman with her career but is not untypical of the material available in sundry volumes about woman-heroines and “Female Worthies” published in the Victorian period. (The Anglo-Irishwoman E. Owen Blackburne's Illustrious Irishwomen of 1877 is a case in point.) Nevertheless, her anti-feminism has a fresh tone which evidently pleased its audience, sometimes to the extent of an ovation, and she cannot have lost friends when she bereated the ‘gentlemen’ present for unfairly judging women by standards which they do not trouble to observe themselves.
 One of the striking features of Montez lectures is her fluence in quotation from the English writers and further afield in European literature. Thus, in her piece on “Beautiful women”, she is able to recall the surprise with which, when younger, she ‘read out of Mr. Hume’s Essays, that ‘there is nothing in itself beautiful or deformed, desireable or hateful; bt these attributes arise from the peculiar constitution and fabric of human sentiment and affection.’ She goes on: ‘though I am not prepared to argue the truth of Mr. Hume’s proposition in its full extent, yet I am free to confess that I find the greatest difficulty in sketching in my own mind the details of any infallible standard of a beautiful woman.’ (Lectures, London: 1858, p.89.) A little later, she quotes John Milton from Paradise Lost (Bk VIII) on the vanity of mortal beauty:

- and, still later, she harps on Milton again when she recounts the progress of age in young women - setting the ‘meridian’ of beauty a little earlier than modern taste and morals allow: ‘Mary passes her teens, and approaches her thirtieth year [...] she may then consider her day at the meridian [...] A few short years, and the jocund step, the air habit, the sportive manner, must be all exchanged for the “faltering steps and slow.”’ (p.110.) Here she is slightly misquoting the last lines of Paradise Lost which show us Adam and Eve departing from Eden, ‘hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow”. (Milton does, however, used “faltering” elsewhere where ‘Old Anarch’ addresses Satan as one of his own: ‘with faltering speech, and visage uncomposed / “I know thee, stranger; who thou art [...]”’ In this case, therefore, the erroneous allusion suggests the depth of her familiarity with its classic source.
 An explanation for the cultural adroitness of Montez’ lectures, to which she took with such panache immediately after abandoning a career as an ‘exotic dancer’, can be sought in her education at the hands of the Misses Aldridge in Bath with its emphasis on classical languages and French accomplishments. According to her own account, her interest in politics was fired by her affair with Henri Dujarrier at the heart of Republican politics in France, her enthusiasm for which caused her to feel ‘almost sickened that she had not been made a man’ by her own account (Autobiography, pp.36-37). It was obviously sharpened by the opportunities of influence affairs during her days as mistress of the King of Bavaria and was never, at any point, of the whimsical kind which she ascribes to various amants of powerful men whose influence led to their lover's ruin - examples of which she blithely enumerates from classical times and modern Asia, with emphasis on the misdeeds of such women among the Mohammedan princes of the Raj.
 In gender politics, as in state politics, she was a liberal and a disbeliever in the inequality of men and women in any important sense. It is difficult, however, to cast her as a progressive in current terms since she was also capable of lending support to slavery and monarchy, as she did in her account of America during the English lecture series of 1859. On these subject she has clearly been wrong-footed by history though she was not in principle an opponent of human rights. That is not to say she was without prejudice since, in an erased sentence in her Autobiography - discovered by Seymour in the manuscript - she writes that she does ‘not hate the Negro because the soul has no colour’, implying that she does dislike the colour. Similarly, as regards feminism, she took an Emersonian view of the centrality of the human soul - our ‘individuality’, as she puts it in the hyperbolic dedication to The Arts of Beauty (1858) [as infra] - but simultaneously condemned the ‘women’s rights’ activists whom she saw as trying to emulate the follies of men. Women writers and women scientists won her admiration.
 When she spoke of ‘gifted’ and ‘intellectual’ women she evidently meant herself along with the others of that kind whom she admired. (In this spirit, the beauteous Duchess of Wellington is written off as a cold sculpture without any intellectual side.) She was clearly a reader as well as an observer - though many of her observations had less to do with personal experience than the books she had read or the people with whom she had talked. Thus it was, for instance, with the assertions about the obesity of the women in the harems of Constantinople which look in during her lecture on “Beautiful Women” which she purports to have visited on an introduction secured for her by Stratford Canning, the long-stranding English Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. In reality she made no such visit and was more likely to have known Stratford, if at all, as an English MP than as a far-travelled diplomat.
  About her capacity for study in preparation for each lecture there is no doubt. It is on record that she assiduously read religious works before embarking on her lecture on “The Origin and Power of Rome” - afterwards published as “Romanism”. Nor was she afraid to court ill-opinion - at least to the extent that it promoted her fame - and to defend her attitudes in the press, as she did with several letters rebutting the supposed anti-Americanism of her British lectures on her return from England to the United States in 1859.
 Shortly after her death she became the subject of romances and biographies, and finally of films such as Lola Montez: the King’s Dancer (1922), with Ellen Richter as Montez, and and later still Max Orphüls’s Lola Montès (1955) - his last work - with Martine Carol in the lead, being based on a French novel. The latter was praised by Truffaut though unsuccessful at the box-office, in part because the idea of her abjection in a circus made little sense to the American audience. It has recently been restored and enjoys the status of a cult film having featured at the French Film Festival of Irish Film Institute in 2008. Montez is also the subject of an RTÉ documentary made by Ann Roper and a novel by Marion Urch (An Invitation to Dance, 2009).

Note there is a recurrent confusion in the biographical literature about Montez regarding the manner of her first marriage - whether she ‘eloped’ with Lt. Thomas or was given to him by her mother. By her own autobiographical account, her mother planned to marry her off as a teenager to an sixty-year-old man called Sir Abraham Lumly - a suspicious theatrical name too reminiscent, perhaps, of Fielding and Sheridan to be credible - causing her to turn to her mother’s younger friend, Capt. Thomas James, who then took advantage of her distress by eloping with her himself. In that account she makes no mention of improper relations between her married mother and Capt. James, though it she does say that it was he who told her of the intended marriage-pact and hence he was both the instigator of her misery and the beneficiary of it. Probably, her intention was to criminalise Thomas in writing it thus in retrospect. Certainly he comes out of it as a very untrustworthy friend and a very greedy man. In reality it may have been quite different and her love for the twenty-seven-old ensign may have been as sincere, at its moment, as first love often is. And since he was a ‘poor ensign’ - as Emily Eden, a kinswoman of the Viceroy of India Lord Auckland, puts it, he must have considered that he was getting a pretty young wife very cheap on the eve of his posting in India - where the couple found themselves after a shot-gun marriage in a very short time. Whether he thought he was cheating on Mrs. Craigie is another question, but the latter's epistolary lament at the wasted education which is recorded in the exhaustive biography by Seymour suggests that her indignation was very real for either reason: the defection of a lover or the theft of a daughter. In a general way, it all bespeaks a highly disordered way of life in the home where Lola Montez raised.
 In later life, home was institution she revered and whose absence in the social order of France she lamented, identifying America is another society in which - for different reasons - home was not a constitutuent of ordinary life:

• Lectures of Lola Montez (Countess of Landsfeld) including her Autobiography (NY: Rudd and Carleton MDCCCLVIII [1858]), 292pp.; Do [another edn.] (London: Gilbert 1858), 192pp. [see extracts], and Do. [another edn.], as Autobiography and Lectures of Lola Montez (Countess of Landsfeld) (London : James Blackwood, Paternoster Row [1860]) [printed by Jack & Evans, Gt. Windmill St. , 202, [2]pp., 17 cm.
• The Arts of Beauty; or, Secrets of a Lady’s Toilet, with Hints to Gentlemen on the Art of Fascinating,by Lola Montez, Countess of Landsfeld  (NY: Dick & Fitzgerald [1858]) [see details]; Do. [rep. edn.] (NY: Echo Press 1978), xiii, 111pp.; also The Arts of Beauty (London: James Blackwood [1850?]), vii, 123, [10]pp. [17 cm; i.e., 10pp. pub. adverts.]

See also Fanny Fern, Rose Clark (London : Routledge 1856), 234, 12pp., [17 cm.], bound together with The life of P.T. Barnum / written by himself (London: Sampson Low 1855), 12pp., and Autobiography and Lectures of Lola Montez (Countess of Landsfeld) (London: Blackwood, 18--?). {Note that Sketchbook of Fanny Fern" is appended to Lectures [... &c.] (London: Gilbert 1858), as supra.

• Bruce Seymour, Lola Montez: A Life (1996; Yale UP 2008), 496pp. [new edn.; pb.; see extracts].

• Mola, oder Tanz und Welt-geschichte: Eine spanisch-deutsche Erzählung [Founded on the life of Lola Montez.] (Leipzig, 1847).
• Paul Erdmann, Lola Montez und die Jesuiten: Eine Darstellung der jüngsten Ereignisse in München (Hamburg 1847), vi, 370pp., 8º.
• L. Beyer, Glorreiches leben und Taten de elelen Senora Dolores, trans. from the Spanish (Leipzig 1847), 24pp. [&c.].
• Gustav Bernhard, Die Gräfin Landsfeld (1848), 21pp. [cited in Jürgen Schneider & Ralf Sotscheck, Ireland: Eine Bibliographie selbständiger deutschsprachiger (Verlag Georg Büchner Buchhandlung 1989), p.274].
• Eduard Fuchs, Ein vormärzliches Tanz-idyll: Lola Montez in der Karikatur (Berli: Frensdorff 1904), 18pp. [90 ills.], 4°.
• [Wolfgang Liepe,] Um Lola Montez: Blätter aus dem Kieler Theatermuseum. [Wissenschaftliche Gesellschaft für Literatur und Theater 1930 [Jahresgabe 1929 vom Theater-Museum in Kiel] (Kiel: 1929), [2]pp., ill. [6 lvs. of pls.; facs. letter of Ludwig I with caricatures and ports. of Montez].

• F[rancis] L[ister] H[awks], “Is Not This a Brand Plucked out of the Fire?” [...] The Story of a Penitent: Lola Montez (NY: 1867), 16°.
• E[dmund] B[asil] D’Auvergne, Lola Montez: An Adventuress of the ’Forties (NY: Brentano’s [1909]; rep. 1924).
• W. R. H. Trowbridge, Sept belles pécheresses, trad. par Ève Paul-Marguerite (Paris: J. Tallandier [1913]).
• Horace Wyndham, The Magnificent Montez: From Courtesan to Convert, &c. [A biography of Lola Montez, Countess van Landsfeld] (London: Hutchinson & Co. 1935), 288pp., ill. [pls. incl. ports.; 8º]
• T[homas] Everett Harré, The Heavenly Sinner: The Life and Loves of Lola Montez (NY: Macaulay 1935), 690pp.; Do., as The Heavenly Sinner: The Romance of Lola Montez (London: Jarrolds. 1936), 639pp.
• [Isaac Goldberg,] Queen of Hearts: The Passionate Pilgrimage of Lola Montez (NY: J. Day Co. [1936]), 308pp., ill. [port; 6 printings +.]
• [Oscar Lewis,] Lola Montez: The mid-Victorian Bad Girl in California [...] (San Francisco: Colt Press [1938]), ill. [Woodcuts by Mallette Dean]
  
• Helen Holdredge, The Woman in Black: The Life of Lola Montez (NY: Putnam [1955]), 309pp. [22 cm.], and Do., rep. as Lola Montez (London: Redman 1957), x, 309pp., ill. [8pp. of pls., ports.; 20 cm.; Bibl. pp.299-301; Index.]
  The Divine Eccentric: Lola Montez and the Newspapers (LA: Westernlore Press [1969]), 228pp. [Bibl., 225ff.].
• Harriet Steel, Becoming Lola ([Ilford]: YouWriteOn Pub. 2010), 315pp. [see summary].

• Grainne Blair [essay on Montez], in Women’s Studies Review, ed. & intro. Maura Cronin, Vol. 7 (2001), q.pp.
• Fiona McCann, ‘Lola, invented by Eliza of Sligo’ [feature-article], in The Irish Times (12 Nov. 2008) [Arts sect.], p.18.
• Marion Urch, An Invitation to Dance (Dingle: Brandon Press 2009), 314pp. [noticed in Books Ireland, Feb. 2009, p.5, & The Irish Times, 13 June 2009 - as infra], and Do., as Die Tänzerin: Ein Lola-Montez-Roman, trans. by Chrisine Pavesicz (Aufbau taschenbuch [digital] 2010).
• Helen Meany, ‘¡Hola Lola!’, in The Irish Times (13 June 2009), [Weekend] Magazine [interview-article based on Urch, supra; see extract].

• Norman Holland, Lola Montez: Der König und die Tänzerin (Munich: Ehrinwirth 1988), 351pp. [cited in Schneider & Sotscheck, op. cit., 1989].
• [et mult. al.]

See also Louise de Vilmorin, Lola Montès, favorite royale (Paris, 1936); rep. as Lolette / édition établie par Patrick Mauriès, avec le concours de Martina Cardelli ([Paris]: Le Promeneur [1999]), 87pp. [viz., Mauriès, Cabinet of Curiosities (2011)].

• Marian Broderick, Wild Irish Women: Extraordinary Lives in Irish History (Dublin: O’Brien Press 2001).
• Siobhán Mulcahy, Heroes & Villains: Forgotten Irish Stories (Dun Laoghaire: Chomsky 2004).
• Thornton Hall, “The Enslaver of a King”, Love Affairs in the Courts of Europe [being Chap. XII] (Alexandra Books; n.d.) [available at Google Books - online.]

• Lola Montès, directed by Max Orphüls [1955], with screenplay by Jacques Natanson, Annette Wademant and Max Orphüls; produced by Albert Caraco (Gamma-Film; Florida Films ; Oska Films) ([London:] BBC 1984) [copy in Warwick U.].
• Do., as Lola Montès / un film de Max Orphüls [director]; avec Martine Carol, Peter Ustinov, Anton Walbrook; scenario de Max Orphüls, adaptation de Annette Wademant et Max Orphüls; dialogue de Jacques Natanson (London: Nouveaux Pictures 2000).
• Do. as Lola Montès / directed by Max Orphüls. (Gaillon : Fil à Film c[1991]).

Sample pages: “The Joys of Married Life” [from Chap. 3 & 17].

[Introductory remarks ...]
‘Alas! for a woman whose circumstances, or whose natural propensities and powers, push her forward beyond the line of the ordinary routine of female life, unless she possesses a saving amount of that force of resistance. Many a woman who has had strength to get outside of that line, has not possessed the strength to stand there; and the fatal result has been that she has been swept down into the gulf of irredeemable sin. The great misfortune was that there was too much of her to be held within the prescribed and safe limits allotted to woman; but there was not enough to enable her to stand securely beyond the shelter of conventional rules. / Within this little bit of philosophy there is a key which unlocks the dark secret of the fall and everlasting ruin of many of the most beautiful and naturally-gifted women in the world.’ (Ibid., p.9; available at Internet Archive - online; accessed 12.12.2014.)

[Account of family and birth...]
‘Lola Montez was then actually born in the city of Limerick, in the year of our Lord, 1821. I hope she will forgive me for telling her age. Her father was a son of Sir Edward Gilbert; and his mother, Lady Gilbert, was considered, I believe, one of the handsomest women of her time. The mother of Lola was an Oliver, of Castle Oliver, and her family name was of the Spanish noble famJly of Montalvo, descended from Count de Montalvo, who once possessed immense estates in Spain, all of which were lost in the wars with the French and other nations. The Montalvos were originally of Moorish blood, who came into Spain at the time of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic. So that the fountain-head of the blood which courses in the veins of the erratic Lola Montez is Irish and Moorish Spanish - a somewhat combustible compound it must be confessed.’ (Ibid., p.11.)

[The first marriage ...]
‘At the expiration of this finishing campaign [viz., the Misses Aldridges’ school in Bath], Lola’s mother came from India for the purpose of taking her daughter back with her. She was then fourteen years old; and from the first moment of her mother’s arrival, there was a great hubbub of new dresses, and all manner of extravagant queer-looking apparel, especially for the wardrobe of a young girl of fourteen years. The little Dolores made bold enough one day to ask her mother what this was all about, and received for an answer that it did not concern her - that children should not be inquisitive nor ask idle questions. But there was a Captain James, of the army in India, who came out with her mother, who informed the young Lola that all this dressmaking business was for her own wedding clothes - that her mother had promised her in marriage to Sir Abraham Lumly, a rich and gouty old rascal of sixty years, and Judge of the Supreme Court in India. This put the first fire to the magazine. The little madcap cried and stormed alternately. The mother was determined, so was her child. The mother was inflexible, so was her child [14] and in the wildest language of defiance she told her that she would never be thus thrown alive into the jaws of death.
 Here, then, was one of those fatal family quarrels, where the child is forced to disobey parental authority, or to throw herself away into irredeemable wretchedness and ruin. It is certainly a fearful responsibility for a parent to assume of forcing a child to such alternatives. But the young Dolores sought the advice and assistance of her mother’s friend, Captain James. He was twenty-seven years of age, and ought to have been capable of giving good and safe counsel. In tears and despair she appealed to him to save her from this detested marriage - a thing which he certainly did most effectually, by eloping with her the next day himself. The pair went to Ireland, to Captain James’s family, where they had a great muss in trying to get married. No clergyman could be found who would marry so young a child without a mother’s consent. The captain’s sister put off for Bath, to try and get the mother’s consent. At first she would not listen, but at last good sense so far prevailed as to make her see that nothing but evil and sorrow could come of her refusal, and she consented, but would neither be present at the wedding, nor send her blessing. So in flying from that marriage with ghastly and gouty old age, the child lost her mother, and gained what proved to be only the outside shell of a husband, who had neither a brain which she could respect, nor a heart which it was possible for her to love. Runaway matches, like run-away horses, are almost sure to end in a smash-up.’ (Ibid., p.15.)

[Note: The orig. vol. here erroneously prints pp.13 & 14 - both number and contents - as 14 then 13; see online.]

[...]

‘Of Lola Montez’ career in the United States there is not much to be said. On arriving in this country she found that the same terrible power which had pursued her in Europe, after the blows she had given it in Germany, held even here the means to fill the American press with a thousand anecdotes and rumours, which were entirely unjust and false in relation to her. Among other things, she had had the honor [49] of horse-whipping hundreds of men whom she never knew, and never saw. But there is one comfort in all these falsehoods, which is, that these men very likely would have deserved horse-whipping, if she had only known them. As a specimen of the pleasant things said of Lola Montez, I am going to quote you from a book, entitled the Adventures of Mrs. Seacole, published last year [viz., 1857] in London, and edited by no less of a literary man than the gifted correspondent of the London Times, W. H. Russell, Esq. Mrs. Seacole is giving her adventures at Cruces, between here and California. She says: “Occasionally, some distinguished passengers passed on the upward and downward tides of rascality and ruffianism, that swept periodically through Cruces. Came one day, Lola Montez, in the full zenith of her evil fame, bound for California, with a strange suite. A good-looking, bold woman, with fine, bad eyes, and a determined bearing, dressed ostentatiously in perfect male attire, With shirt-collar turned down over a velvet lappelled coat, richly worked shirt-front, black hat, French unmentionables, and natty polished boots with spurs. She carried in her hand a handsome riding-whip, which she could use as well in the streets of Cruces as in the towns of Europe; for an impertinent American, presuming, perhaps not unnaturally, upon her reputation, laid hold jestingly of the tails of her long coat, and, as a lesson, received a cut across his face that must have marked him for some days. I did not wait to see the row that followed, and was glad when the wretched woman rode off on the following morning.”’ (Ibid., pp.49-50.)

[Note: Montez rebutts the remarks by denying that she every wore men’s clothes outdoors to except as a disguise to re-enter Bavaria, had never had a whip in her hand in Cruces and, lastly, that she had ever been to Cruces. (See further under W. H. Russell - who edited Mrs. Seacole’s book - as attached.)

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[Lecture:] “Beautiful Women”
‘[...] I am impressed that some sketch of my own observations of the national types of beautiful women will be more interesting to you than any speculation or theory on the subject, abstractly considered. And on the whole I must give the preference to the English nobility for the most beaitiful women I have met with.
 ‘In calling to mind the many I have seen, in the course of my life, I find yself at once thkining of the Duchess of Sutherland. She was a large and magnificent woman - a natural queen. Her complexion was light, and she might be considered the paragon and type of the beautiful aristocracy of England. I next think of Lady Blessington. She was a marvellous beauty. Kings and nobles were at her feet. In Italy they call her a goddess. She was very voluptuous, with a neck that sat on her shoulders like th emost charming Greek models, a wonderfully beautiful hand, and an eye that when it smiled, captivated all hearts. She ws a far more intellectual tpe of beauty than the Duchess of Sutherland.
  ‘The present Duchess of Wellington is a remarkably beautiful woman - but with little intellect or animation. She is a fine piece of sculpture, and as cold as a piece of sculpture. The most famously beautiful family in England were the Sheridan family. There were two sons who were considered the handsomest men of their day. They there are three daughters,the Hon. Mrs. Norton, well known on this side of the Atlantic through her poverty and misfortunes! Lady Blackwood and Lady Seymour, who was the queen of beauty at the famous Eglinton Tournament. These three beautiful Sheridan sisters used to be called “the three Graces of England.” Lady Seymour has dark blue eyes, large, lustrous, and most beautiful while Lady Blackwood and Mrs. Norton have grey eyes, but full of fire, and soul, and beauty.
  ‘The women of France are not generally beautiful, although they are very charming. The art of pleasing, or of refined and fascinating manners, is the first study of a French lady. But stil France is not without its beautiful women. The Marquise de la Grange was one of the most beautiful women I have ever met in Paris. [...] (Ibid., p.60.)’

‘In Turkey I saw very few beautiful women. The style of beauty there is universally fat. Their criterion for a beautiful woman is that she ought to be a load for a camel. They are, however, quite handsome when young, but the habit of feeding them on such things as pounded rose leaves and butter, to make them plumb, soon destroys it. The lords of creation in that part of the world treat women as you would geese - stuff them to make them fat.’ (Ibid., p.61.)

[Note: The visit to Constantinople is deemed apocryphal by her modern biographer, Bruce Seymour.]

[Fashion-history:]
‘Rome, queen of the world, the proud dictatress to the Athenian and Spartan dames, disdained not to array herself in their dignified attire. [...] It was the irruption of the Goths and Vandals which made it necessary for women to assume a more repulsive garb. The flowing robe, the easy shape, the soft unfettered hair, gave place to skirts shorted for flight or contest - to the hardened vest, and head buckled in gold or silver. / Thence by natural descent, came the iron bodice, the stiff farthingale, the spiral coiffure of the middle ages [..] These preposterous fashions disappeared in England a short time after the Restoration [...].’ (Ibid., p.63.)

[Note: In the whole volume (Lectures [... &c.] 1858) the word ‘sex’ occurs 25 times but only as a synonym for gender, as in ‘the fair sex’ (p.79) or the epigram ‘Genius has no sex’ (Ibid., p.111.)

Quotes a ‘shameless confession’ of Lord Chesterfield: ‘I will own to you, under secrecy of confession, that my vanity has very often made me take great pains to make many a woman in love with me if I could for whose person I would not have given a pinch of snuff.’ (Ibid., p.98.) This dictum comes under the heading of ‘a modern gallant, or flirt, [...] a poor imitation of [...] the genuine gallant of the days of chivalry.’ (Ibid., p.96.)

[On tepid baths:]
‘[...] Many a rich lady would give thousands of dollars for that full rounded arm, and that peach bloom on the cheek, possessed by her kitchen-maid; well, might she not have had both, by the same amount of exercise and simple living? [See note.]
 ‘Cleanliness is the last receipt which I shall give for the preservation of beauty. It is an indispensable thing. It maintains the limbs in their pliancy, the skin in its softness, the complexion in its lustre, and the whole frame in its fairest light. The frequent use of the tepid bath is not more grateful to the senses, than it is salutary to health and beauty. It is by such ablutions that accidental corporeal impurities are thrown off, cutaneous obstructions removed, and while the surface of the body is preserved in its original brightness, many threatening, and beauty-destroying [116] disorders are prevented. This delightful oriental fashion has for many years been growing into common use with well conditioned people all over the world; especially on the continent of Europe is this the case. From the Villas of Italy to the Chateaux of France, from the palaces of the Muscovite to the Castles of Germany, we everywhere find the marble bath under the vaulted portico or the sheltering shade. Every house and every gentleman of almost every nation except England and America, possesses one of these genial friends of health and beauty. But every beau tiful woman may be certain that she cannot preserve the brightness of her charms without a frequent resort to this beautifying agent. She should make the bath as indispensable an article in her house as her looking- glass.’ (Ibid., pp.116-17.)

[Note - The Arts of Beauty (1858) - Chap. III: “How to obtain a Handsome Form”, contains the following: ‘And what is good for the girl is good for the woman too. The same attention to the laws of health, and the same pursuit of out-door exercise will help a lady to develop a handsome form until she is twenty or twenty-five years old. “Many a rich lady would give all her fortune to possess the expanded chest and rounded arm of her kitchen girl. Well, she might have both, by the same amount of exercise and spare living.” And she can do much to acquire then even yet.’ (p.27.)
 In writing this, she is quoting her own Lectures (p.116; as supra) - and indicating as much by means of inverted commas, though not mentioning the source. The effect of this quotation is not simply to recycle her own writings, nor even to indicate that The Arts of Beauty actually grew out of the lecture on “Beautiful Women”, but to constitute the former as a classical capable of being quoted as an authority in relation to the issue of health and beauty in question. BS]

[Love in America:]
‘I have already intimated that the United States is too much a merchantile, too busy, and too practical a nation, to entertain the old spirit of gallantry, which requires leisure, and the cultivation of romance; but when I say this, I do not mean that there is not plenty of courting in this country, though love, like everything else, is a business here; that is, I mean that the gentlemen make love in a truly business-like manner. They will manage the heart of a pretty woman as easily as they do the stocks on the ’Change; and the panics whch they create in the social markets eat even the revolutions and breakdowns in the regions of finance. I believe that the American is regarded a dull fellow who cannot win the heart of a [105] lady, a thousand dollars, and establish a new bank, with the prospective capital of three millions, before breakfast.’
[...]
‘But for all that I believe there is a great deal of genuine truth and honest love of woman among the lords of creation in the United States, and it is none the less honourable to woman if it refuses to adorn itself with the artificial embellishments of gallantry. It is not a whit less honest, either, for being of a somewhat Davy Crockett style. (p.106.)

[Note: Montez here quotes with approbation Dr. Franklin’s undertaking to put off an appointment with eternity for eight o’clock for the sake of an hour longer spent with ‘so enchanting a daughter of the earth’ in a letter, and cites the ridicule of its bad French lavished on it by the Frenchman who drew it to her attention. (Ibid., pp.106-07.)]

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[Lecture:] “Heroines in History”
On Cleopatra: ‘I do not offer one excuse for her faults. I only demand that a great woman should be judged by the same rules by which a great man is judged. If the lords of creation demur to ths, I shall challenge them to show me by what divine right they are justified in a career of pleasure which should be forbidden to woman!’ (Ibid., p.125.)

[See also her remarks on Burke’s ‘violence of women’ - under Edmund Burke, supra.]

‘No, the wise and cunning of my sex all know that, in politics, they must not even let the right hand know what the left hand doeth. And what do I care who carries the votes to the box, if I am allowed to say how the voting shall be done? The will of every intellectual and adroit woman does go to the ballot-box, with a voice a hundred fold more potential than if she rushed into the coarse crowd to carry it there herself. In such a contact the mass of women would only lose the delicacy and refinement which now constitute their only charm, without getting any benefit for the terrible sacrifice. The kitchen and the parlour, and all the sacred precincts of home, would be immeasurably impaired, while there would be no gain whatever to the councils of the state. If a woman is qualified to be a happy wife and a good mother, she need never look with envy upon the more gifted woman of genius, whose mental powers, unfitting her for the stormy arena of politics, may have unfitted her for the quiet walks of domestic life. In the woman of rare mental endowments, there may be a necessity in her own nature, forcing her into a field of action altogether different in its sphere from the duties usually allotted to woman. Where this is the case, she must [127] obey her destiny; but the woman who has only those humbler charms which fit her to be the light and the presiding goddess of the beautiful circle of “home,” is really to be envied by her more gifted sister whose powers tempt her out upon the turbulent sea of politics and diplomacy.
 ‘But, alas! woman's lot in this sphere of home is too often a sad and thankless one. It is demanded of her that she make a home whether her husband provides the means or not, and it must be a happy one, though his temper is as savage as that of a tiger.
  ‘And how many thousands of women do make a home, and, for their children, a happy one too, when spendthrift husbands have deprived them of all resources but their own industry and skill? and how many millions of the “lords of creation” really live on the skill and industry of their wives? The greatest tragic actress that ever lived, Maria Arne, was only tempted on to the stage after the extravagance of her husband, Theophilus Cibber, had left her no other resources, her début was so much admired, that her salary was voluntarily doubled after the first night. “When Garrick was made acquainted with the circum- stances of this worthy lady's death, he exclaimed, ‘Then Tragedy has expired!’”’ (Ibid., pp.127-28.)

‘What do men mean when they call woman the weaker sex? Not, surely, that she is less strong and brave of heart and purpose to meet the tidal shocks of life! Not that she is not every whit the peer of man in all the elements of heroism and genuine nobility of soul! That masculine philosophy which regards and would treat woman as an inferior beings, is not only an insult to that God who created her as the equal companion of man, but it is contradicted by every stage of history and experience. Her excellence may be generally displayed in a less ostentatious field than man’s, but still the idea of perfect equality is not impaired on that account.
 ‘Nor does this idea of woman’s equality destroy the idea that the woman who is a wife should study to reflect the opinions and the honour of her husband, provided he is a man who has opinions and honour to be reflected. I fully endorse the sentiment of Plutarch [129], that “a wife should be as a mirror to represent her husband,” provided he is such a husband as an honourable woman could justly represent.’ (Ibid., p.129; American edn. pp.203-04.)

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[Lecture:] “The Comic Aspect of Love”
‘Mahomet had two wives when he became enamoured of one of his slaves, named Moutia, of singular beauty. His wives publicly reproached him with this, and to make it all right he was obliged to make Allah speak, which he did in the fifty-sixth chapter of the Koran, where he declares that it had been revealed to him that all good Mussulmans might make love to their slaves in spite of their wives. This pretty Moutia, whose charms brought down such a singular revelation from Allah, was an Egyptian by birth, and by education a Cliristian, and it was said that the government of Egypt had presented her to Mahomet. But no sooner had heaven been made to sanction concubinage, than it also fully authorized adultery; for, the prophet becoming enamoured of the wife of one of his freedmen named Gaib, he carried her off and married her.. This occasioned a great scandal at first, but Wahomet put a stop to all murmurs, by making an addition to the thirty-third chapter of the Koran, where he makes Allah declare that he had married Zanib to his prophet! And, as this [142] new article might justly awaken the apprehensions of all husbands who had pretty wives, Mahomet made Heaven declare also, that if he should ever in future become enamoured of married women, they should be sacred; and this was perfectly satisfactory to the husbands.
 ‘There is, indeed, no end to the vagaries of love when once it is connected with the religious element, or even with philosophical enthusiasm. The religious Mormons, and the philosophical Free-lovers [viz., afore-mentioned Frascatelli], are sufficient evidences of that. The vagaries of this free-love philosophy are as old in the world as sin.’ (Ibid., pp.142-43.)

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[Lecture:] “Romanism”
‘I know not that history has anything more wonderful to show than the part which the Catholic Church has borne in the various civilisations of the world.’
[...]
 ‘Such is the tremendous fabric of Rome, standing out on the foreground of the world’s history, and bearing upon its scarred bosom the marks of the various civilisations and barbarisms through which it has passed. Regarded in the light of a merely human institution, it is worthy of the profoundest study of man; but the moment it puts in a claim of divine origin and appointment, it sinks beneath the contempt of human reason. If it comes before us in its sacerdotal robes and bids us bow our faith to its monstrous profanities, we shake it from us and cast it off with dis- gust and horror; but in its human aspects, in its [168] moral and political career, we will look fairly at it. and inquire how it came to pass that an institution so loaded with the crimes and groans of ages, and stained with the blood of martyrs, and fraught with such shocking absurdities, could hold on so long, and play the part it has in the history of the world’s progress.’
[...]
‘[... I]t is plain enough to see where its [169] image-worship and hero-worship came from; for far as these things are removed from the spirit and precepts of Christ, they were actually wants of the popular mind, trained in the long school of Paganism, and familiar with the picturesque materialism of the Greek philosophy. Romanism in its origin was a compromise between Christianism and Paganism, by which nearly all the superstitions and immoralities of the latter contrived to get themselves baptized with the Christian name. And this fatal compromise was the work of the people more than of the priest; thus the decision of the Council of Ephesus (held under Pope Celestine, a.d. 431), that it should be permitted to invoke Mary of Nazareth by the style and title of “Mother of God,” was received by the people out of doors with shouts of exultation; the prelates as they issued from the synod were saluted with every expression of applause, and the victory was celebrated by a general illumination.’
[...]
 ‘So, too, the dogmatizing theology of Rome, the long creeds fenced by short and sharp anathemas, [170] were no arbitrary creation of the early priests, but were a result of that taste and talent for theological syllogizing, which the Church borrowed from the subtile and disputatious Greek mind. In fact, the whole thing was little more than a Christian translation of Paganism, in which, by a sort of metempsychosis, the soul of ancient Greece seemed to live over again.
 ‘So after all, there is nothing very shocking nor very strange in the rise and growth of this vast fabric of Rome it rose out of a great number of interests, or intellectual and moral wants and habits embodied in an organized institution by a succession of powerful minds, themselves partaking of these varied influences, and often giving expression to them in connection with the most vulgar and superstitions of times.
 ‘And herein lies the great secret of the strength and success of Rome; in its perpetual willingness to compound with whatever popular vice or superstition, for the sake of unlimited dominion over the public mind. By this means it has acquired a fearful control over opinions and institutions during the fifteen hundred years of its reign, and it is impossible to say how far the providence of God may have compelled the vast worldly forces of this Church to contribute to the general safety and blessing of humanity.’ (Ibid., p.171.)
[...]
 ‘There is such a thing as universal truth, and there is such a thing as apostolic succession, made not by edicts, bulls, and church canons, but by an interior life divine and true. But all these Rome has perverted, by hardening the diffusive spirit of truth into so much mechanism cast into a mould in which it has been forcibly kept; and by getting progressively falser and falser, as the world has got older and wiser, till the universality became only another name for a narrow and intolerant sectism, while the infallibility committed itself to absurdity after absurdity, at which reason turns giddy, and faith has no resource but to [174] shut her eyes; and the apostolic succession became narrowed down into a mere dynasty of priests and pontiffs. A hierarchy of magicians, saving souls by machinery, opening and sliutting the kingdom of heaven by a sesame of incantations which it would have been the labour of a lifetime to make so much as intelligible to St. Peter or St. Paul. In this abyss of superstition and moral pollution, when the voice of Luther came upon it like thunder [...]’ (Ibid., pp.169-74.)
[...]
 ‘Now, ladies and gentlemen, if you go through the various Catholic and Protestant Cantons of Switzer- land, you will find this comparison to hold true with them all. No reflecting person can look upon those scenes without being impressed -with the fact that [182] Rome is an enemy to popular freedom, and a scourge of modern civilisation.
 ‘The same thing stares at you in every Catholic country in Europe. You see it in Spain, Portugal, Italy, and the South of Ireland ; and then how do you see it, also, in the two Americas! Compare South with North America. Will you tell me that climate produces the indescribable difference between the two? You are contradicted by the fact, that the advantages of climate and soil are with South America; and, as if Providence had intended it to be the greatest producing country on earth, it has the most majestic and the longest rivers in the world. I shall not pause to picture the wretched condition of South America, nor shall I attempt to describe the prosperity of North America. I begin to get dizzy myself when I think of it. And to what are you indebted for your superiority? To that sharp individualism, that spirit of progressive freedom, involved in the principles of the Reformation.
 ‘In 1781 Raynal wrote this of your country, “If ten millions of men ever find an assured subsistence in these provinces, it will be a great deal.” Well, if that little party which came out in the Mayflower had been Catholics instead of Puritans, if they had brought with them the spirit of Rome instead of the Reformation, and if those who followed them to these shores had brought the same religion, you would not have been over ten millions of people to this day; then the world would have had neither steamboats nor telegraphs. These things are too fast for Rome. [180]
 She looks to the past. She stands with her back to the present : she inhabits the Statu-quo [sic] and hates and would destroy, if she could, that principle of progress which gave you your national existence. America does not yet recognise how much she owes to the Protestant principle. It is that principle which has given the world the four greatest facts of modern times - steamboats, railroads, telegraphs, and the American Republic!’ (Ibid., pp.180-81.)