Still from the film The Duchess and information from the book, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire

Georgiana, played by Keira Knightley

‘I know was handsome .... and have always been fashionable, but I do assure you,’ Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, wrote to her daughter at the end of her life, ‘our negligence and ommissions have been forgiven and we have been loved, more from our being free from airs than from any other circumstance. Lacking airs was only part of her charm. She had always fascinated people. According to the retired French diplomat Louis Dutens, who wrote a memoir of English society........................

The Duke, played by Ralph Fiennes

The Duke had had a lonely upbringing which was reflected in his almost pathological reserve. One of his daughters later joked that their only means of communication was through her dog: ‘the whole of tea and again at supper, we talked of no one subject but the puppies .... I quite rejoice at having one in my possession, for it is never a failing method of calling his attention and........................

Charles Grey, played by Dominic Cooper

He was only twenty-three years old, the eldest son of a general from a well connected Northumberland family.  Georgiana had met him before, when he was a schoolboy at Eton, and had visited his parents at Coxheath.  In the intervening period he had grown into a tall, handsome young man........................

Lady Elizabeth Foster, played by Hayley Atwell

Never was a story more proper for a novel than poor Lady Elizabeth Foster’s (wrote Mrs. Dillon).  She is parted from her husband, but would you conceive any father with the income he has should talk of her living alone on such a scanty pittance as £300 a year!  And this is the man who is ever talking of his love of hospitality and his desire to have his........................

Lady Spencer, played by Charlotte Rampling

Georgiana’s mother had delicate cheekbones, auburn hair and deep brown eyes which looked almost black against her pale complexion.  The fashion for arranging the hair away from the face suited her perfectly.  It helped to disguise the fact that her eyes bulged slightly, a feature which she passed on to Georgiana.  She was intelligent, exceptionally well read and, unusually for women of her day........................

Charles James Fox, played by Simon McBurney

Charles James Fox, her second new acquaintance, made a great impression on Georgiana, not in a romantic way – that would emerge later – but intellectually.  It was Fox, more than anyone else, who led Georgiana to her life’s vocation – politics.  Fox was a brilliant though flawed politician.  Short and corpulent, with shaggy eyebrows and a permanent five o’clock shadow, he was already at twenty-eight marked down as a future leader of the Whig party when the Marquess of Rockingham retired........................

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, played by Aiden McArdle

At its broadest the Circle numbered more than a hundred people; at its most intimate, thirty.  In modern terms they were London’s ‘cafe society’: the racier members of the aristocracy mixed with professional artists and actors, scroungers, libertines and wits.  The playwright and arch-scrounger........................