Amanda Foreman knew she'd finally shaken the Duchess's ghost when she stopped dreaming about her.

The 31-year-old historian admits that while researching and writing her book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (just out from Random House), she was obsessed with her subject, who in the late 18th century was the undisputed leader of fashionable society. Georgiana also was a distant relative and forerunner of a present-day fashion icon - the late Diana, Princess of Wales.

On the beat: Foreman photographed in a London police car.

"When I finished my book I was so lonely, because she was out of my life," Foreman recalls. "It took me a year to get over her because she seemed so real to me."

Georgiana was both a product of her own time and a harbinger of the future. The daughter of the first Earl Spencer, one of the richest men in England at the time, she charmed society with her beauty, wit and intelligence but also scandalized it with her behavior, which included gambling incessantly, having affairs with both men and women and wearing outrageous, three-foot-high hairstyles containing everything from ships to wooden farm animals.
She also was one of the first members of the aristocracy to mingle with commoners and solicit their political opinions perhaps her worst sin of all.

What most fascinated British reviewers of the book, however, were the parallels between Georgiana and Diana, another member of the Spencer clan. Even Foreman reluctantly admits the similarities: both were in a loveless arranged marriage with an important member of the aristocracy, both had affairs, both suffered from bulimia and both were major celebrities of their eras.

"The resemblances are uncanny, but history is filled with weird uncanniness," says Foreman. "Georgiana was the prototype of the modern celebrity, and you can see what celebrity does to a person through her. Everything she did was public knowledge, and no one else had ever had that much attention before. Part of her life's struggle was getting her feet back to earth and remembering what it was like to be ordinary."

Foreman's biography caused an immediate stir in London when it was published there last year, both because of its quality (it won the prestigious Whitbread Biography of the Year Award) and its writer. After all, there aren't that many young, blonde, glamorous historians who'll pose naked (discreetly covered by books) for a British fashion magazine. When The Sunday Times of London listed the 20 most influential people in the British arts, Foreman came in at number 12 "right behind Robbie Williams but ahead of John Galliano!" she says.

Foreman, a London native, is the daughter of the late Carl Foreman, the American who wrote the scripts for such films as High Noon and The Bridge On the River Kwai.He fled to England after he was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and died when his daughter was 16.

Her conversation is still peppered with references to her late father, who, she says, would have been immensely proud and surprised by her success. Foreman admits she was a horrible student when she was a teenager and failed for two years straight to get into a British university. She then applied to 26 American colleges, all of which turned her down. Finally she got into Sarah Lawrence, where she thrived studying Wittgenstein and the German idealists. After graduation she moved on to study history at Oxford. Her thesis topic: Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

Foreman is now researching her second book, which is about the British soldiers who fought in the American Civil War. So she'll be living in the U.S. for the foreseeable future, buried deep in naval and military archives. It helps that her fiancé, an English banker, has been transferred to New York.

"We're getting married this year," Foreman says excitedly. "I knew I wouldn't be able to have a proper relationship with anyone until I'd finished with Georgiana. Sure enough, four months after I finished the book, there he was."
JAMES FALLON

Foreman posed naked (discreetly covered by books) for a British fashion magazine.

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