Diana Villiers
| Diana Villiers | |
|---|---|
| First appearance | Post Captain |
| Created by | Patrick O'Brian |
| Information | |
| Gender | Female |
| Spouse(s) | Stephen Maturin |
| Children | Brigid Maturin |
Diana Villiers is a fictional character in the Aubrey-Maturin series of novels by Patrick O'Brian. Described as beautiful, mercurial, and entirely unreliable, she is the great love and great sorrow of Stephen Maturin's life.
Diana enters the series in the novel Post Captain, which begins with Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin living ashore during the Peace of Amiens. They first see her in a fox hunting field near their leased country house, and are impressed by her beauty and bold spirit.
In Post Captain, Diana is living with the Williams family, as a poor relation. Previously a resident of India, where her father was a general and her husband was an official of the East India Company, she returned to England after both men were killed in the same battle with the forces of "Tippoo Sahib". Both Aubrey and Maturin are intrigued by the fiery Diana, although Aubrey also forms a conflicted attachment to Diana's more placid cousin Sophia. Despite Maturin's social disadvantages of being unattractive, illegitimate, and Catholic, Diana enjoys his company and even admits him to her bedroom. However, she does not seem to reciprocate his infatuation and carries on simultaneous affairs with other men, including Aubrey.
In HMS Surprise, Maturin meets Diana in India. She accepts his proposal of marriage after Maturin kills one of her other lovers in a duel. However, before the marriage can take place, she goes to the United States with Johnson, an American she met in Calcutta. She returns to London in Desolation Island, having left Johnson, who turned out to have been married to another woman. Maturin sees her there and all his hopes rise again. She and her housemate, Mrs. Wogan, are questioned as spies by an incompetent admiral, sending Diana away as innocent, while her friend negotiates a sentence of "transportation" to Botany Bay, on the ship that Jack Aubrey captains. Stephen joins him, by way of relief from the intelligence and social pressures on him.
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