Lady of the Cards documents the relationship of publisher and artist Rosita Fanto, and Richard Ellmann, famed biographer of W.B.Yeats, James Joyce and Oscar Wilde. Fanto describes their meetings in Monaco, London, Oxford and New York, the growth of their friendship, its flirtations with romance, and the developing tensions with Ellmann's family, who imagined that the artist and the writer had become lovers. It chronicles the Ellmann-Fanto publication of the Oscar Wilde Playing Cards, the course of Ellmann's debilitating illness--Lou Gehrig's Disease-- his death and its legal and emotional consequences, focusing on his close relationship with "Rosita"(Fanto) at the end of his life. The memoir written in the form of a novel explores private archives and summons true identities.
Intellectually and emotionally stimulating, Lady of the Cards is a sensitive and rich description of that delicious frisson of excitement which occurs between two people walking along the edge of an emotional cliff.
Merlin Holland, author of The Wilde Album and Oscar Wilde, a Life in Letters
