Harriet C. Ely Blackford

Henrietta Blackford

Born to a very prominent minister, Rev. Ezra Ely in Philadelphia in the middle of the 19th Century, she went from being the daughter of a respected clergyman to America's first real courtesan, an American adventuress, leaving a trail of havoc in her wake before threat of arrest forced her to flee to Europe. In Russia, she took up with the unstable dangerously liberal Grand Duke Nicholas Konstantinovich, a grandson of Tsar Nicholas I, and was at the center of the scandal over his theft of his mother's jewels, (he gave Henrietta a diamond necklace he had stolen from his own mother), which resulted in the Grand Duke being banished from court.

Newly Published book about her: Fanny Lear: Love and Scandal in Tsarist Russia

Her book written in French: http://books.google.com/books?id=j8YKAAAAIAAJ&ots=V4Zv4awVAS&dq=Har...