Dorothea Maunsell


Dorothea Maunsell became Dorothea Kingsman after being Dorothea Tenducci was a British singer at the centre of a scandal after she married an Italian castrato opera singer named Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci. He had children with her second husband.

Life

Maunsell was born in Dublin in about 1750. She was brought up in Molesworth Street in Dublin. Tenducci was an opera star of the time who had given lessons to Mozart. He had been castrated as a teenager to stop his voice from breaking during puberty.
Much of the detail of her life comes from a publication titled "The True and Genuine Narrative of Mr and Mrs Tenducci: in a Letter to a Friend at Bath" which was published in 1768. According to this she had music lessons from Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci. During the lessons she had a "tender affection" for him although he was fifteen years older than her. Her father was keen to marry her to a man her had chosen and Maunsell realised that Tenducci was a possible alternative.
Although a castrato, Tenducci married 15-year-old Dorothea Maunsell secretly in 1766. The marriage was repeated in July 1767 with a license granted by the Bishop of Waterford and Lismore. In 1772, those marriages was later annulled on the grounds of non-consummation or impotence, which was one of the few grounds that women could use to sue for divorce. However, Giacomo Casanova claimed in his autobiography that Dorothea gave birth to two children. His subsequent biographer Helen Berry was unable to corroborate this claim and suggests that they may have been the children of Dorothea's second husband, Robert Long Kingsman.

Death and legacy

Maunsell had two more children in Ireland with Kingsman but her place and date of death is not known. In 2012 Helen Berry wrote a fictionalised biography of her life in "The Castrato and his Wife".