[var. c.1820; pseud. of [Marie Dolores] Eliza [Rosanna] Gilbert; Gräfin von Landsfeld], b. Grange, Co. Sligo [var. Limerick], dg. of Capt. Gilbert, a penniless Scottish officer, and a 14-year old milliner, herself the illeg. dg. of Sir Charles Oliver; family moved to India, where Gilbert dies on arrival, 1864; raised with her mother another officer in Bath, by then married to George Craigie; sent to Scotland for education with her step-father's Presbyterian family, 1827 [aetat. 9]; attended finishing school at Bath; eloped at 17 with her mother’s lover, Irish lieutentant [and Wexford landowner] Lt. Thomas James; married and travelled with him to India, 1837; discovered her husband to be violent and unfaithful; involved in scandals and separated, returning to England, 1840; divorce proceedings initiated by James, citing George Lennox, 1842; commenced a career in dancing [actress]; travelled and studies in Spain and elsewhere in Europe;

had affairs with Franz Liszt, Alexandre Dumas, and newspaper editor Henri Dujarier (who died in a duel); adopted name and identity of Donna Lola Montez, exotic dancer and war-widow; exposed as fraud at London debut; toured Europe; became mistress to King Ludwig I of Bavaria (aetat. 60), purportedly stripping naked to demonstrate how little she needed stays, and was created Countess of Landsfeld by him, with life-pension, Munich 1846; influenced him against Jesuits and was banished from Bavaria at his forced abdication, 1848; married an English cavalry officer, George Trafford Heald in Paris within a year; toured her show Lola Montez in Bavaria, successfully in USA and Australia; invested profits in gold speculation in Sierra Nevada and Australia; travelled to Australia as a dancer; lost a lover overboard on voyage; issued The Art of Beauty (1858; French trans. 1862);

turned philantropist on recommendations of a former schoolfriend, and spent last years visiting former prostitutes in Magdalen Society [Asylum], NY; Autobiography and Lectures of Lola Montez (1858), ghost written by Rev. C. C. Burr, and issued in various German and other translations; lectured in the Rotunda, Dublin; suffered stroke; died of pneumonia, in New York at 41 [var. 42 &c.]; she was the subject of a film by Max Ophüls as Lola Montèz (1963), with Martine Carol in the lead; praised by Truffaut but unsucessful; revived for French Film Festival of Irish Film Institute, 2008; subject of an RTÉ documentary by Ann Roper and a novel by Marion Urch (An Invitation to Dance, (2009). DIW

• Norman Holland [novel, trans. as], Lola Montez - Der König und die Tänzerin (Munich 1988), cited in Jürgen Schneider & Ralf Sotscheck, Ireland: Eine Bibliographie selbständiger deutschsprachiger (Verlag Georg Büchner Buchhandlung 1989), p.274, with further contemporary accounts incl. Gustav Bernhard, Die Gräfin Landsfeld (1848), 21pp.;
• Paul Erdmann, Lola Montez und die Jesuiten (Hamburg 1847);
• Eduard Fuchs, Ein vormärzliches Tanz-idyll: Lola Montez in der Karikatur (Berlin [n.d.]), 184pp.;
• L. Beyer, trans. from Spanish, Glorreiches leben und Taten de elelen Senora Dolores (Leipzig 1847), 24pp. [&c.];
• Grainne Blair [essay on Montez], in Maura Cronin, ed. & intro., Women’s Studies Review, Vol. 7 (2001), q.pp.

See also Fiona McCann, ‘Lola, invented by Eliza of Sligo’ [feature-article], in The Irish Times (12 Nov. 2008) [Arts sect.], p.18. Also Marion Urch, An Invitation to Dance (Dingle: Brandon Press 2009), a novel on Montez [noticed in Books Ireland, Feb. 2009, p.5.]