The Forbidden Wife: The Life and Trials of Lady Augusta Murray

The Forbidden Wife: The Life and Trials of Lady Augusta Murray by Julia Abel Smith (The History Press, £20)
The story of the original Duke of Sussex – and the woman he was never allowed to be with. Prince Augustus Frederick, the sixth son of George III felt desperately in love with Lady Augusta Murray, the daughter of the Earl of Dunmore, and the pair married, in secret in Rome, three months after meeting. Without the King’s permission, their wedding would be illegal – and, in that moment, Augusta’s life changed: ‘From eighteen-century socialite she became a nineteenth-century reject.’ Abel Smith is a wonderful storyteller, her descriptions of late-eighteenth-century Virginia, Rome and London are almost novel-like in colour and detail. Meticulously researched and elegantly told, it’s an excellent biography of a woman forbidden, but – thanks to Abel Smith – not forgotten.