Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl

She appears briefly - "a wastrel among the worthies," the column had concluded - in a new volume of Durham Biographies, geographically qualified by a term or two at the Misses Ridsdales' finishing school in Houghton-le-Spring and at Mr Rae's Genteel School in Monkwearmouth.

In those days she was plain Eliza Gilbert. Thereafter, it should at once be admitted, the phrase "genteelly does it" does not spring readily to mind.

Much, much more has been written about the lovely Lola, and that doesn't (unfortunately) include the Kinks' 1970 hit of the same name which, of course, was about a feller.

There has been an autobiography, several biographies, three or four ballets, an Australian musical and, 140 years after her death, a website revealingly called stripperpower.com.

One of her own books was unsuccinctly entitled "The Arts of Beauty or Secrets of a Lady's Toilet with Hints to Gentlemen on the Art of Fascination". Algernon Swinburne, the English poet, met her and set her to verse:

Could you hurt me, sweet lips, though I hurt you?

Men touch them, and change in a trice.

The lilies and languors of virtue

For the raptures and roses of vice...

She was the mistress of King Louis I of Bavaria and of the composer Franz Lizst, who wrote her a smitten sonata. She was the darling of New York - where she lectured on "Care of the Bust" - the femme fatale who quickened the pulse of the Australian gold rush, the single most talked-about woman (it is said) of her time.

There's even a typewritten rhapsody in Sunderland library's local studies section from a stage-struck suitor in Seaham Harbour.

It was the Tarantula Dance that spun most seductively - "famously suggestive" wrote a contemporary, though suggestive of what is not properly recorded. The spiders, in any case, were rubber.

More moderate historians describe her lifestyle as unconventional, even as liberated; others term it scandalous - "an actress of questionable talent and morals, full of life and vinegar".

Rob Williams in Newcastle additionally points out that she appears in one of the Flashman books, was the subject of the self-evident truth "What Lola wants, Lola gets", and ("though it shames me to know this," says Rob), might have been the lady serenaded by Mr Barry Manilow in Copacabana.

"Her name was Lola, she was a show girl..."

She was born in Ireland, possibly of a Spanish mother, in either 1818 or 1821. Mr Rae's genteel wife was Lola's mother's sister.

"People in Sunderland still seem quite proud of her," says Ray Kelly, from Chester-le-Street, who wrote the short piece in Durham Biographies.

Though her mother wanted her to marry an elderly judge, she eloped with an army lieutenant, divorced him five years later and, in 1846, entertained King Louis - the word "entertained" may be euphemistic - when the monarch was 62 and old enough to know his castanets from his courtesans.

Soon he sacked his Jesuit advisers, made Lola Countess of Landsfeld and one or two other noble places, installed her as his principal adviser.

By 1848, however, the people (and the put-out priests) really were revolting. Louis was deposed, Lola fled an angry mob - doubtless taking her rubber spiders in her hand luggage - and continued to dance her way across the continents.

Everywhere she went, she attracted admirers and scandal, says one account - and Lola impersonators, too, which may account for some unreliable portraiture.

"Pictures of Spanish-looking women, or women in riding habits holding whips, have frequently been palmed off as Lola images," claimed a 19th Century account.

Whether her habits included regular use of a whip we have been unable to discover, though she did take one to the editor of the Ballarat Times - who doubtless thoroughly deserved it - after an unfavourable review.

Lola is also said to have stabbed a fellow dancer, appeared at Marlborough Street court charged with bigamy and appeared on stage with a lap dog - its role happily unspecified.

Though in the last two years of her short life she is said to have devoted failing energies to helping "fallen women" in New York, she died best remembered for her own tumultuous ups and downs, for her masquerade and for her manipulative means with men.

"Her power behind thrones and in bedrooms around the world made her one of the best known women of the Victorian era," concludes the MacMillian Dictionary of Women's Biography. The New York Times obituary talked of her "wonderfully chequered" lifestyle. The Misses Ridsdale might have liked that: local lass makes bad.

TOM Purvis, to whom thanks for his usual invaluable assistance - thanks also to Phil Westberg, John Briggs and Rob Williams - had never heard of Lola until February, when instantly he was entranced.

Tom had instead been researching the so-called Sunderland Babbies - lead statues once familiar at the entrance to the Roker park - when he came across the lady.

The "babbies", believed to have been two of ten imported from Germany and melted down to help the war effort in 1940, stood originally outside the house in Roker Avenue where Mr Rae's school had been housed.

Children of Sunderland's principal families all attended. The precocious Eliza Gilbert, claimed an 1889 account, received "the elements of a good substantial education" from Mr and Mrs Rae and was regarded by contemporaries as "a very interesting, clever, pretty girl."

History was to prove them right on every count.

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