Wendy Moore biography

Interview

Wendy Moore explains how she came to write Wedlock, the true story of the disastrous marriage and remarkable divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore, who at age 11 became the richest heiress in 18th Century England, only to stumble headlong into an abusive marriage and scandal following her first husband's early death.

How did you come to write Wedlock?

Wedlock is my second book and also my second relating the life of an eighteenth-century personality. After writing my first book, The Knife Man, about the eighteenth-century surgeon John Hunter, I was scouting around for another idea. I was still drawn to the colorful world of medical history and spent many weeks pottering around dusty medical archives when suddenly Mary Eleanor Bowes burst into my life.

I had had a brief encounter with Mary Eleanor Bowes, the Countess of Strathmore, in writing my first book. She was a friend of John Hunter and donated to him the skin of a giraffe that had been brought back from an expedition she had sponsored to southern Africa. I knew no more about her until the curator of the Hunterian Museum in London, where John Hunter's human and animal body parts are exhibited, mentioned that the countess had a fascinating story of her own. Not expecting much, I ordered a few books—accounts of the divorce case and the kidnapping trials published at the time—when I next visited the British Library. I could scarcely believe what I read. The shocking story of an accomplished heiress who was tricked into marrying an Irish scoundrel ...