Maritime Museum does welcome resurrection of remarkable woman's reputation

There are few eras of British history before our modern one that have as many fascinating women as the late 18th and early 19th century.

Of course there's my heroine, Jane Austen, but she's just one of a flock of impressive writers including Ann Radcliffe and Fanny Burney. Mary Wollstonecraft struck some remarkable blows for early feminism, while her daughter Mary Shelley shook up the world with Frankenstein. Angelica Kauffman and Elisabeth Vigee le Brun were remarkable painters, while silversmith Hester Bateman created some of the forms we think of as classically Georgian. Sarah Siddons was establishing what we now know as modern stage acting, while Byron's daughter Ada Lovelace was making contributions to higher mathematics that would lead to modern computing. Georgiana Spencer was a notable, and fascinating, figure on the national political stage. I could go on.

Inevitably, most of these women have taken a shadowy place behind the men of the era. Of few is this more true than Emma Hamilton, now known by most ... if she is known at all ... as the mistress of Lord Nelson. But Emma was so much more than that. A fascinating show at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich is currently trying to set the record straight.

A woman with a remarkable aptitude for learning, she was an actress, model, singer, classicist, diplomat and arbiter of fashion. She used her skills to triumph through a series of circumstances that would have destroyed most women. She left home and was making her own way as a servant from the age of 12. She probably had to survive a stint as a prostitute (the usual end for young girls seeking their fortune in London, with up to 50,000 women working in the city's sex trade at the time) before she managed to ascend to the ranks of kept mistress to a nobleman. He dropped her when she became pregnant. She found another "protector" from amongst his friends. It might have been a similar story to many other girls used and tossed away, had it not been for Emma's thirst for knowledge. With every step she drank in lessons, from etiquette and accent to literature and current events. This is, undoubtably, one of the things that made her so fascinating to the portraitist George Romney, who painted her more than 70 times.

One of the triumphs of the show is a whole room of these Romney portraits. Romney said one of the reasons he kept returning to her as a model was her ability to inhabit a part, while society ladies all shared the same placid, expressionless gaze. Here you see her as a demure matron, a joyous young girl, a penitent Magdalen, a sensuous bacchanate; clearly all the same woman, but inhabiting radically different roles. It's easy to imagine what an astonishing actress, and how charismatic, she must have been.

Another horrific tragedy befell her when her second patron, Charles Greville, wanted to get rid of her in order to marry an heiress. Rather than settling an amount of money on her (the usual way of breaking up such relationships at the time), he shipped her to his uncle in Naples, telling her it was a vacation that he'd soon join her on, while informing his uncle that he was sending him a new mistress for his enjoyment. The show does a fine job using contemporary documents to dig into the tension of this situation. The handbook Charles gave her on being a good wife, annotated and clearly studied by Emma in an attempt to be all he had wanted ... despite the lack of legal status ... exposes the depths of his villainy. Her letters back to him, showing a slow realisation that he'd ended the relationship without the courage to do it face-to-face, are heartbreaking. There's no question she adored him.

Emma combined luck and fortitude to transform crisis into survival. Greville's uncle was the British ambassador to Naples, who was also a well known antiquarian and a "must see" stop on the grand tour. He was fascinated as much by Emma's mind as by her beauty, and set out to transform her, My Fair Lady style. In this part of the exhibit, paintings, books and artefacts bring the remarkable world of turn-of-the-19th-century Naples to life. Pompeii was giving up its treasures, there was a glittering royal court, every artist and intellectual came through town and Vesuvius smouldered over it all.

The place, and Hamilton's tutelage, inspired Emma to create The Attitudes ... a highly intellectual mime show in which she would transform, with the aid of just a few props and a shawl, into a series of historical and literary women from the ancient world. Visitors loved the challenge of figuring out who was who, showing off their impressive classical educations as they did so. I'd read much about The Attitudes, but the exhibit's decision to bring them to life by creating a small theatre and presenting a film of an Emma look-alike performing some of them was a master stroke. When she wasn't performing, she was studying classical pottery or hiking up Vesuvius for early lessons in vulcanology with Hamilton, or working with a singing coach. Her voice was good enough that the Madrid opera tried to hire her, and Haydn wrote a cantata within his Nelson mass for her to sing. At this point, the naval hero was no more than a respected friend.

Hamilton then shocked society by marrying her. But Emma was so famous by this point ... evidenced by a set of fine china on display with her Attitudes as the painted decoration ... she could ride out the negative comments. Here starts the summit of Emma's career. Now Lady Hamilton, artist and aristocrat, she became close friends with Queen Maria Carolina of the Two Sicilies. As the daughter of the Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa and the sister of the recently executed Marie Antoinette, Maria Carolina had learned a lot of first-hand lessons about government. Some good, some bad. She needed them, since her husband Ferdinand was ... to put it kindly ... developmentally challenged. Maria Carolina was functionally ruling the kingdom, giving Emma enormous influence. As the Napoleonic wars heated up, Emma was playing a critical diplomatic role, even taking the lead in organising the court's evacuation to Sicily in the face of a threatened revolution.

This is where things get weird, and where we enter the story Emma is best known for. The Hamiltons provided political support for Nelson and nursed him back to health after the Battle of the Nile. They were good friends. At some point, Emma and Nelson became lovers. The ageing Hamilton didn't seem to mind. Demonstrating that the trend for the press turning against favourites is an old one, a series of political cartoons illustrate how the London papers made Emma the villain. Though their love was ardent and sincere, society never accepted the fallen Lady Hamilton's relationship with their naval hero.

The final rooms show the life they tried to make together, despite public disapproval and Nelson's wife. (Lord Hamilton died two years before Nelson, eliminating half of their barrier, but Lady Nelson refused divorce.) Nelson's letters displayed here are filled with passionate love and firm instructions to pour all of the proceeds of his successful career into furnishing the house they shared together. You can see drawings of the place and some of the furniture, along with a painting of their daughter Horatia. It's most striking for the fact that the painter chooses a pose similar to one that made the young Emma famous. He tries to conjure the old magic, but the daughter was a sadly plain girl with a wistful expression ... as if to embody the tragedy in store for both her parents.

Particularly poignant is the display of Nelson's will, scribbled hastily the night before the famous battle that killed him, begging the government to take care of Emma. The government ignored him. Emma could have lived quietly on the pension she received from Lord Hamilton's estate, but she was too used to the high life. The final room of the exhibit exposes the full tragedy of her fall, as she has to sell off the house she shared with Nelson, ends up in debtor's prison, moves to Calais to escape her creditors and dies of liver failure brought on by attempting to drink away her despair. The parting sight is Nelson's dress uniform. Empty. Ghostly. A haunting image of the love that sent a remarkable woman's life on a trajectory to doom.

Well done to the National Maritime Museum for trying to redress history's crimes of omission. Emma Hamilton deserves to be so much more than the a sexual footnote of famous man's story. She has an amazing life all her own, and this exhibit does a fine job telling us about it. The show's on until 17 April, more info here.