Last night, I was watching The Duchess on Netflix Instant (best business model EVER), and two thoughts kept bouncing around in my head.

The first: “How historically accurate is this?”

I should confess that history often bores me unless it’s presented in the form of a compelling narrative – most of my Civil War knowledge comes from either Gone With the Wind or the North and South trilogy – so I’m trying to discern where the line between information and entertainment is running throughout the story.

It turns out the movie is based on a biography which was edited from a doctoral thesis (at Oxford, natch) by Amanda Foreman, who wrote an intriguing article when the movie came out comparing Foreman’s perception of Georgiana when she was in her 20s (and wrote the biography) to her perception seven years later as a mother.

And now I want to read all of this author’s thoughts, and am entirely distracted in this curiosity, and haven’t even made it to the intended meat of this blog post.  So we’ll save the second movie-related observation for another day.  (Or, if we’re realistic in our expecations, it’ll float around in my brain space for a while, and then disappear into the ether.)