In 1878, Emilie Langtry, known as ‘Lillie’, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of the Dean of Jersey, was presented to Queen Victoria. Outside the palace, crowds clamoured for a glimpse of the ‘Jersey Lily’, described by the artist John Everett Millais as ‘the most beautiful woman on earth’. Lillie later recalled that she was one of the last women to be presented that day, and, unusually, the Queen had chosen not to retire early but to stay until the end of the presentation ceremony. Like her subjects, the Queen couldn’t resist the opportunity to see Lillie in the flesh.

In her arms Lillie carried a bouquet of white roses, a gift not from her husband Edward, but from her lover, the Prince of Wales. Twenty-two years later, at the age of nineteen, Lillie’s illegitimate daughter Jeanne Marie was also presented to Victoria – her sovereign and, perhaps, her grandmother. But unlike other ‘professional beauties’ and royal paramours paraded at court, Lillie was a queen of reinvention, with a knack for turning publicity into profit. Sharp and canny, she would soon transform herself from royal mistress and beauty icon into an actress and businesswoman, weathering the storm of every scandal. She became the ultimate Victorian celebrity, winning the praise of William Gladstone, Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain.

Born in 1853, Lillie grew up in a rambling old rectory in Jersey in the company of her six brothers. Her idyllic childhood was largely spent romping around the island with them, riding horses and playing practical jokes, but she later confessed that she had often dreamed of meeting a ‘Prince Charming’ who would whisk her away to a glamorous new life. When Edward Langtry, the widowed son of a Belfast shipping magnate and friend of her elder brother, William, sailed into the port in a ‘large and luxurious’ yacht in 1873, it must have seemed like all her childish fantasies were coming true. Ignoring the reservations of her parents, Lillie seized her opportunity and she and Edward were swiftly married in 1874.

Alas, Edward was an idle, frequently inebriated gentleman distinguished by neither talent nor wealth. Lillie soon tired of her new life and persuaded her reluctant husband to relocate to London, where there would be more opportunities for amusement and social advancement, later remarking, ‘I was possessed by the conviction that my destiny lay in London’. Edward sold the house in Southampton, the coach and the yacht, and, for a time, Lillie and her husband joined the throngs of respectable middle-class tourists visiting museums and galleries and walking in Hyde Park hoping to catch a glimpse of royalty.

It was while they were attending the public opening of a new aquarium in Westminster in 1876 that the couple bumped into some aristocratic acquaintances from Jersey, and were invited to their regular Sunday tea party. At this tea party, Lillie and her husband secured an invitation to an evening party that changed Lillie’s life forever.

Lillie’s appearance at this party created an instant sensation. In the very first sentence of her autobiography, she acknowledged that her physical appearance, specifically her flawless complexion, was the foundation of her subsequent fame and fortune. Dressed in a simple black dress, with no jewels and her hair dressed plainly, she was so beautiful and charming that guests flocked to be introduced to her. Word spread quickly, and soon every socialite in town wanted to secure her as a guest. Her portrait was painted by George Frederick Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, James Whistler, and many others, the most famous of which was Millais’ ‘The Jersey Lily’, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1878. The artist used a moody palette of black and brown tones to offset her pale complexion, striking blue eyes, and charming chin dimple, depicting her in half-profile with a serenely calm expression reminiscent of the goddesses of classical antiquity. Lillie proudly recalled ‘the crowd which constantly surged about it’.

Her star rose in tandem with the development of new print technologies, which circulated her image to the masses. They revered her. Within a year, she had transformed from a provincial nobody to the leader of the ‘professional beauties’ – those Society belles whose portraits adorned shop windows across the nation. Among her many new and celebrated friends was Oscar Wilde, who published a poem dedicated to her in 1879 entitled ‘The New Helen [of Troy]’ which praised ‘the white glory of [her] loveliness’. Crowds gathered wherever she went, her sartorial choices sparked new trends, and stories circulated of people standing on chairs at events to get a better look at her. Lillie had staged a coup – and won.

Propelled into the most exclusive circles of Society, she soon won the attention of several royal suitors. The young Hapsburg heir, Crown Prince Rudolph, had a much-publicised infatuation for her, and several of her biographers claim that during the late 1870s she also embarked on a brief affair with the dashing naval officer Prince Louis of Battenberg. Most notably, between 1877-1880 she became the mistress of the Prince of Wales. The affair was an open secret, the lovers frequently seen riding together in London and attending the races – a lifelong passion of Lillie’s.

All the while, Lillie’s marriage was disintegrating. Her husband sank ever deeper into debt, despondency and drink, and was finally declared bankrupt in the early 1880s. Around the same time, Lillie discovered she was pregnant. As Edward was not the father, she had little choice but to inform her husband she was leaving him, give up the London house, sell her effects at auction and retreat to Jersey for her confinement. In her autobiography, Lillie acknowledged that the Princess of Wales herself had called on her before she left London and requested that the royal physician should attend on her. However, she failed to mention that she had also received a cheque from one of the Prince’s friends loaning her £2000. The birth of her daughter Jeanne-Marie in the spring of 1881 was concealed from almost all of her acquaintances, including her estranged husband. Her daughter referred to her as ‘aunt’ in public and was generally assumed to be the child of one of Lillie’s many brothers.

The indefatigable Lillie soon hired a governess and returned to London. Ostracised by Society, she was able to leverage her infamy into a hugely profitable career as an actress, making her stage debut in December 1881, aged twenty-eight. ‘Mrs Langtry’ earned a staggering £60,000 in the first decade of her career, her performances breaking box office records on both sides of the Atlantic. Reflecting on her audacious pivot from belle of the ball to leading lady, she coolly stated:

I had loomed so largely in the public eye that there was no novelty in facing the crowded audience, in which I knew most of the occupants of the stalls and boxes, and all in the cheaper parts knew me.

The Prince of Wales continued to act as Lillie’s supporter and patron until his death, frequently attending the opening night of her plays, often accompanied by his long-suffering and faultlessly gracious wife. Lillie spent long periods of time touring America in a lavishly decorated state-of-the-art railway carriage that attracted huge crowds and media coverage everywhere she travelled. Well-publicised affairs with suitors such as the young American millionaire Frederick Gebhard Jr. and the notorious reprobate George Baird, Baron Auchmeddon – who assaulted her in a jealous rage in Paris and then bought her an enormous yacht nicknamed ‘The Black Eye’ – thrilled and scandalised the public, fuelling ticket sales. Throughout her career she followed the advice of her (somewhat unlikely) friend William Gladstone, who advised her never to attempt to justify or explain herself to her detractors – although, ironically, in 1927 she was forced to deny claims she had had an affair with the eminent statesman.

Her astounding success enabled Lillie to support herself, her child and her parents, repay her husband’s debts and provide him with a small annuity, and make frequent shopping trips to Paris to buy gowns from the famous couturier Charles Worth. Shrewdly adapting to changing times, in 1882 Lillie became the first women to negotiate a lucrative endorsement deal when Pears Soap paid her over a hundred pounds to sign a statement recommending their product, and by 1900 she had her own brand of face powder. As ticket sales began to dwindle at the turn of the century, Lillie performed another astonishing metamorphosis: under the pseudonym ‘Mr. Jersey’ she became a successful racehorse owner, making a small fortune betting on her stable and twice winning the Cesarewitch at Newmarket, becoming the first woman to do so.

Mark Twain once remarked that ‘Mrs. Langtry is an exceptionally intelligent person… it would be hell to be married to her. She’s too damn bright’. Separated from her first husband for many years, he had steadfastly refused to grant her a divorce. Eventually, he was committed to an asylum after being found drunkenly wandering on railway tracks, and he finally died the very day of her first triumph at the Cesarewitch in 1897. The contrast between the victorious Lillie, photographed with the Prince of Wales at Newmarket, toasted with champagne at the Jockey Club, and the pathetic figure of her deceased husband, elicited a torrent of abuse.

But Lillie, remembering Gladstone’s advice, didn’t yield. Two years later, aged forty-six, Lillie married the twenty-eight-year-old Hugo de Bathe, the eldest son of a baronet. When the Boer war broke out the following year, Hugo went off to South Africa to fight, but soon caught a fever and was hospitalised before being discharged on medical grounds. On his return to London in 1900, he was spotted in the company of various chorus girls. Lillie remained married to Hugo until her death in 1929 but, as with her previous marriage, it was a union in name only, Lillie financially supporting him in return for his infrequent attendance as her escort at formal events. He neither lived with her during her retirement to Monaco, nor attended her funeral in 1929. Hugo offered little in the way of emotional or financial support, but the marriage can be seen as the final step in her meteoric rise to fame and fortune, providing her with the title of Lady de Bathe when her father-in-law died in 1907. The young woman who had been feted, and then cast out by the aristocracy, had finally joined their ranks.

Beautiful, ambitious, inordinately famous in her own lifetime, Lillie was the living embodiment of the ‘Cinderella’ story: the example par excellence of a woman who gained entrance to the highest social circles on the strength of her appearance alone. And yet, while it was her beauty that first gained her fame, it was her indomitable spirit, resourcefulness, and above all, her business acumen, that enabled her to convert the intangible glamour of fame and notoriety into the hard cash of fortune. The famed Broadway theatre producer Henry E. Abbey once commented that ‘Mrs. Langtry is as tough a businesswoman as she is a lovely lady’. Although she has now faded into obscurity, we should remember her not merely as a social climber, but as a pioneer, a tenacious pragmatist who used every means at her disposal to build a life of romance, adventure and – above all – independence.