Emma, Lady Hamilton (1765–1815) gained notoriety at the end of the eighteenth century as England’s most beautiful woman and the paramour of Vice Admiral Lord Horatio Nelson. She began as Amy Lyon, an uneducated blacksmith’s daughter in London. She found reprieve from life in the shadows by becoming the petted confidante of royalty, wife of volcanologist and British envoy Sir William Hamilton, muse to famous painters, and mistress to England’s naval hero in Italy. Her most extraordinary growth occurred during her Neapolitan years when she became multilingual, absorbed classical learning, and developed interpretive dance as an art form. In addition, the Hapsburg royal family credits her with saving them from rebellious Jacobin crowds in Naples as she engaged in the delicate diplomacy of the Napoleonic era. In these events, she emerged as a powerful political actress, yet at the height of her agency, society transformed her into an object of scorn and national embarrassment. She ended her life as an impecunious exile in Calais. In the end, her detractors proved more potent than her friends.