SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ BD B7corral all the facts in recounting a life that
even her contemporaries found wildly im-
probable.
Living for years in the highest echelons of
London society, supposedly as a single wom-
an, Chudleigh avoided contact with her
groom, who took up with numerous other
women during his travels abroad. But even-
tually Hervey, back in Britain, desired to
marry again. Chudleigh had by then attractedborderline personality disorder. Citing psy-
chiatrist James Arkell, the author writes that
those with the disorder “are often charismatic
performer types, like Elizabeth.” Notably, this
same diagnosis has been applied posthu-
mously to Diana, Princess of Wales, a child of
a painful divorce. While it’s intriguing to
speculate on modern interpretations of
Chudleigh’s behavior, the real strength of the
book is the author’s painstaking effort toHis postwar life in America (which is beyond
the scope of Corngold’s book), with the onset of
the Cold War and then the McCarthy years,
became increasingly disappointing. The same
“militant humanism” that he had employed so
brilliantly against Hitler now made him look
positively “un-American” to some people in
power. “I had to get to be 75 years old and live in
a foreign country that has become home to me
just to see myself publicly called a liar, by
burners of witches,” he observed bitterly in
1951.
Mann returned to Europe in 1952, never to
leave again. Ironically, it was politics that had
brought him to America, and politics that
pushed him away. The mind is always in exile.uncertainty and exile after 1933, had been his
schooling in bourgeois humanism and liberal
democracy. The same man who, on Sept 18,
1914, spoke of the “great, basically decent, even
solemn people’s war of Germany” now savaged
the Nazi government for initiating and con-
ducting a completely unjustifiable war. The
German people’s lack of opposition to the Nazis
made Mann ashamed of his former country,
and he wanted to conjure up a different Ger-
many, one of which anyone could be proud. He
ended up finding that country in his own work:
“My home is in the works that I bring with me.... They are language, German language and
form of thought, personally developed tradi-
tional ware of my country and my people.
Wherever I am, Germany is.”
After the war, Mann would say that his
“years of battle against [Hitler] were morally a
good time.” He had his reasons to be nostalgic.
about the “national distribution of wealth and
commodities” make a cameo in Joseph’s work
for the pharaoh.
The most demanding part of Mann’s Prince-
ton life, however, and that which forms the
bulk of Corngold’s book, must have been his
activism as a public intellectual. He was a
political essayist in much demand and wrote
for such prominent publications as the New
Republic, the Atlantic and the Nation. He also
toured the country, lecturing on a wide range of
topics. And from 1940 until the end of the war,
he had a monthly radio program that was
recorded in the United States, flown to England
and then broadcast into Germany via the BBC.
Through these efforts, Mann comes across
as one of the most prolific and impactful
“militant humanists” working against Hitler’s
regime from abroad. Life in Germany under
the Weimar Republic, and then his years ofBook WorldTHE MIND
IN EXILE
Thomas Mann
in Princeton
By Stanley
Corngold
Princeton.
280 pp. $35THE DUCHESS
COUNTESS
The Woman
Who
Scandalized
Eighteenth-
Century
London
By Catherine
Ostler. Atria
Books.
432 pp. $30the attention of the fabulously wealthy Duke
of Kingston. In the ecclesiastical courts, she
argued that her union with Hervey had never
been legal: There were no reliable witnesses
to the alleged wedding, it happened after
canonical hours, and no banns were read. The
church lawyers agreed, and thanks to a
special license granted by the Archbishop of
Canterbury, Chudleigh married Kingston in
1769, on her 48th birthday.
The two might have lived happily ever after
but for the duke’s death four years later, at
which time his family, led by a resentful,
disinherited nephew, sought to prove the
ducal marriage invalid on the grounds that
Chudleigh was already someone else’s wife.
The case went to the House of Lords, and for
the trial spectators packed Westminster Hall
to the rafters. Among the onlookers were
Queen Charlotte and five of her children,
including the future King George IV, then age
13, and the future King William IV, 10.
Newspapers devoted endless inches to this
woman who had climbed from undistin-
guished beginnings to become one of the
richest ladies in Britain. Society gossip and
man of letters Horace Walpole dubbed her the
Duchess Countess, and the snarky nickname
caught on because Hervey had by now rather
unexpectedly inherited his grandfather’s title.
Chudleigh dressed for her trial in black
with a black hood, in the manner of Mary
Queen of Scots going to her execution, and
testified at length in her own defense. But the
sole living witness to the events in question, a
vengeful servant called Ann Craddock, gave
damning evidence. When the guilty verdict
was announced, Chudleigh sank “lifeless to
the ground,” according to a witness. She
recovered her composure sufficiently to ask
for leniency, and the Lords agreed not to
brand her thumb with a letter “M” (for
“malefactor”), the statutory punishment for
having two spouses simultaneously.
Chudleigh, enlisting a look-alike cousin to
ride around town in her distinctive carriage,
was able to travel to Dover incognito and
escape to the Continent. She retained a
portion of the rents from Kingston’s estates
and used that money to start over.
The last years of Chudleigh’s life — spent in
St. Petersburg, Estonia and Paris — are
colorful but less interesting than the account
of the trial, which Ostler carries off masterful-
ly. “Bridgerton” fans take note: For sheer
incident and drama, Chudleigh’s story rivals
any episode of the popular Regency-era Net-
flix series. And it’s all true.With the American colonies in open
rebellion against the Crown in April
1776, members of the British ruling
class had far more serious matters to concern
them than whether, 32 years previously, a
young woman and a young man had legally
wed, in secret, in the middle of the night, in a
Hampshire mausoleum. And yet the bigamy
trial of Elizabeth Chudleigh is what preoccu-
pied aristocrats and politicians, along with a
good portion of the British populace, at the
time.
Chudleigh, a former maid of honor to the
Princess of Wales, had by this point attained a
secure position in society. Although she had
grown up with slender means, the daughter of
a baronet’s second son who had died when she
was a small child, she had become a popular
maid of honor, “a unique position between
debutante and lady-in-waiting, the first step
on a well-trodden ladder to an advantageous
marriage,” as the job is described in “The
Duchess Countess: The Woman Who Scandal-
ized Eighteenth-Century London,” by Cather-
ine Ostler.
Chudleigh achieved this thanks to her
lovely looks, enormous charm and daredevil
spirit. For a masquerade in the Haymarket,
where King George II was a fellow guest, she
dressed as the Greek princess Iphigenia,
wearing a gown of sheer, flesh-colored silk,
appearing, in the candlelight, to be clad in
nothing at all. The monarch, far from feeling
offended, openly proclaimed his admiration
for his son’s wife’s lady and ordered up
another masquerade in her honor.
But this boldness, so helpful in attracting
the royal eye — one thinks of Kate Middleton’s
famous appearance in a see-through mini-
dress at a charity fashion show when she and
Prince William were students at the Univer-
sity of St Andrews — had a downside. On
summer holiday five years before, Chudleigh
fell for a hotblooded but penniless naval
officer she encountered at the Winchester
Races: Augustus Hervey, grandson of the Earl
of Bristol. On the spur of the moment, they
hauled the local vicar out of bed and, in front
of a handful of witnesses, exchanged vows.
When Hervey returned to sea, Elizabeth kept
her impetuous marriage a secret, thus pre-
serving the 200 pounds she earned annually
as a maid of honor, a job open only to
spinsters.
In this skillful and highly entertaining
biography, Ostler theorizes that the uninhibit-
ed Chudleigh was a bit unhinged. Having lost
a previous love interest, and experiencing at
an early age the deaths of both father and
older brother, this young woman may have
suffered from what today would be labeledThe uninhibited Elizabeth Chudleigh, whose bigamy trial captivated BritainHULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESHISTORY REVIEW BY CLARE MCHUGHClare McHugh is the author of the novel “A Most
English Princess.”Elizabeth
Chudleigh, depicted
around 1760,
married the Duke of
Kingston in 1769,
but she had a
secret: She was
already married.Costica Bradatan is a professor of humanities in
the Honors College at Texas Tech University. His
book “In Praise of Failure” is forthcoming.‘I
am an American,” Thomas Mann said
during a radio interview in 1940. If he
sounded relieved, it was because he was:
He had been in limbo for years. Mann left
Germany in 1933, and the Nazi government
deprived him of his German citizenship in- He first took up residence in Switzerland
and later became a citizen of Czechoslovakia.
As Adolf Hitler’s expansionist intentions be-
came clearer in the late 1930s, Mann must have
realized how unsafe it was becoming for him to
stay in Europe. The occupation of Czechoslova-
kia in 1939 probably sealed the writer’s deci-
sion to move to the United States, when he was
in his 60s.
Mann’s first American home was Princeton
University, which had already attracted promi-
nent German figures fleeing the Nazis, most
famously Albert Einstein. In “The Mind in
Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton,” Stanley
Corngold documents, in depth and with an
excellent eye for detail, this important stage in
Mann’s American life, before he moved to
California in March 1941. What Corngold, a
Princeton professor himself, seeks to achieve is
to “shape a cultural memory of Thomas Mann
during his American exile in Princeton — a
link, by memory, to a continuum between ‘our’
past and present.”
He more than delivers. The picture of Mann
that emerges from his book is rich, multilay-
ered and always fascinating. As his friend and
fellow exile Hermann Broch observed, Mann
had a “stupendous capacity for work,” which
allowed him to put his exile to good use.
Throughout those years, Mann was highly
productive — in several domains simulta-
neously.
There is, first, Mann the academic. The
writer had been hired by Princeton to give a
series of public lectures in the humanities, as
well as some more-specialized seminars. The
lectures’ topics ranged from Goethe’s “Faust”
and Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen” to
Mann’s own “Magic Mountain,” and they at-
tracted an appreciative audience. The irony
must not have been lost on Mann: Here he was,
a “lecturer in the humanities” at one of the
finest American universities (not to mention
the honorary degrees he had received, or would
receive, from others) without having ever
earned his Abitur (the German high school
diploma). But irony was always Mann’s el-
ement, both in his work and in his life.
All this time, Mann kept working on his
literary projects. During his stay in Princeton,
he completed “Lotte in Weimar” (better known
in English as “The Beloved Returns”) and
wrote an “Indian story” (“The Transposed
Heads”), as well as the first chapters of “Joseph
the Provider” (the last installment of the tetral-
ogy “Joseph and His Brothers”). For the last he
drew inspiration from New Deal economic
policies. Many of Franklin Roosevelt’s ideas
How Thomas Mann escaped to America and waged a moral battle against HitlerHISTORY REVIEW BY COSTICA BRADATANASSOCIATED PRESSThomas Mann with
his wife, Katia,
right, and their
daughter Erika as
they arrive in New
York in 1939.
During his exile at
Princeton, Mann
continued to write
fiction but also
emerged as one of
the most prolific
“militant
humanists”
working from
abroad against
Hitler’s regime.