from www.smh.com.au – Is there no end to Tiger Woods’s appetites? That’s the claim from one of his alleged mistresses. Loredana Jolie Ferriolo [pictured] is reportedly seeking a seven-figure book deal in which she will reveal that the lustful golfer had sexual encounters with men.

From Monica Lewinsky to Julie Kavanagh, former girlfriend of writer and Byronic chick magnet Martin Amis, kiss-and-tell memoirists are everywhere, particularly when it comes to juicy stories about celebrities.

And Lewinsky isn’t the only White House intern to kiss and tell. These days, Mimi Beardsley Alford is a retired US church administrator. But when she was a willowy 19-year-old, she had an affair with President Kennedy. She has signed a six-figure book deal to reveal their relationship.
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But this is small beer. What would you say to a woman who has sex with royalty, nobility and other powerful men, and then begins to name them in her serial memoirs? Her lovers’ names can be left out, but only if they agree to contribute to her retirement. Naked blackmail, of course, but still they queue up to buy their anonymity, and the writer gets rich.

Who is this gold-digging bimbo? She was never a bimbo — far too smart for that — and she’s been dead for more than a century. Harriette Wilson, one of the most notorious courtesans of Regency England, knew (in every sense) most of the great men of her time, including the Duke of Wellington and George IV. Her sensational memoirs are proof that kiss-and-tell is almost as old as the oldest profession.

Caroline Breashears knows all about Wilson and other women who made a fortune either from publishing their memoirs or having them suppressed. An associate professor at St Lawrence University in the US, she’s at the forefront of feminist scholarship in this field, and is coming to Melbourne as a guest speaker at the To Deprave and Corrupt: Forbidden, Hidden and Censored Books conference later this month.

Breashears says that these books are not really about sex, and they work hard to show the authors as more than money-obsessed whores. Often the women wrote to vindicate and support themselves — not easy in a precarious profession with no pension plan.

Harriette Wilson’s memoirs are a delight to read, Breashears says, because she understood that her greatest revenge was to show her paramours as love-struck caricatures of themselves. The great Duke of Wellington looked like “a rat-catcher” and young Lord Worcester used to toast her muffins and lace her stays like a chambermaid.

Another scandalous memoirist, Mary Anne Clarke, was the mistress of Frederick, Duke of York, from 1803 to 1806, and well known for sashaying through the House of Commons in a sensational low-cut gown. To support her lavish lifestyle, she began selling commissions to army officers, pinning lists of their names to the bedroom curtains so the Duke would know who to promote. When the Duke tired of her, she created a scandal by exposing the corruption and writing her memoirs — which the Duke suppressed in exchange for the huge sum of £10,000 a year.

All copies were burnt, but Wilson’s memoirs are still in print and there’s a biography, The Courtesan’s Revenge, by Frances Wilson. The memoirs make good reading, Breashears says: “They demonstrate that, although times and laws have changed, human nature hasn’t.”