Fanny and Stella (54 page)

Dressed in silk and suitably padded, bewigged and with a very generous application of paint, Fanny made a handsome woman

Fanny (left) – ‘a gabbling, good-natured, prattling, gossiping, charming young man’, photographed with an unknown gentleman in Chelmsford in 1868

Fanny, with her ‘sterner features’, had a natural bent for playing domineering duchesses and dowagers of a certain age

A love triangle: Fanny (standing) and Stella (front) with Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton

Stella and Fanny dressed in character in the sort of drawing-room entertainment they toured to small country houses and market-town assembly rooms

Stella and Charles Pavitt on tour in Essex in 1869

The shocking case of ‘The Female Personators’ was front-page news all over the country

The Comical Countess and Carlotta Gibbings

Stella, now blonde, in New York circa 1875, taken by the celebrity photographer Napoleon Sarony.

Stella as a shepherdess of the golden age, circa 1880

Sisters. Side by side and shoulder to shoulder. Sisters for better or for worse: Stella rests her head on her beloved Fanny’s breast.

First published in 2013
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This ebook edition first published in 2013

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© Neil McKenna, 2013

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ISBN 978–0–571–28850–2