Rage and Fire : A Life of Louise Colet - Pioneer, Feminist, Literary Star Flaubert's Muse.
Gray, Francine Du Plessix.
Place Published: London:
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton,
Date Published: 1994.
Description: FIRST UK EDITION, FIRST PRINTING (1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2). 432 pages with index plus 16 pages black & white photos and illustrations. The book is FINE. The dust jacket is NEAR FINE with minor shelfwear. NOT price-clipped. NOT remaindered. Dust jacket notes read: "In this ground-breaking biography of a heroic feminist and literary figure, novelist and essayist Francine du Plessix Gray brilliantly resurrects one of the most fascinating women of the nineteenth century. To English-readers, the flamboyant and beautiful Louise Colet (1810-1876) is best known as Gustave Flaubert's great love; as a central model for Emma Bovary; and as the recipient of Flaubert's most treasured letters, a voluminous six-year correspondence that offers his most eloquent statement on literature and an invaluable chronicle of Madame Bovary's composition. What is less known about Louise Colet is that at the apogee of her career she was, along with George San, one of the most famous women writers in France, a prolific author equally fluent in poetry, fiction, historical essays, and journalism. Known as "the Muse," Colet presided over a renowned salon of mid-nineteenth-century Paris. At age twenty-nine she won the poetry prize of the Academie Francaise, and she went on to receive the prize three more times in the next fourteen years, more often than any other woman in French history. The confidante of Madame Recamier, Victor Hugo, and Leconte de Lisle and a lover of Alfred de Vigny and Alfred de Musset, this self-supporting single mother refused to share her home with a man lest it compromise the principle of liberty she lived by. In her work, Louise Colet was one of the first nineteenth-century authors to explore historical causes of female alienation; in her private life, she pioneered a new model of womanhood in an age when the only sanctioned options for women were 'housewife or whore.' Drawing from Colet's recently discovered journals, which, like Flaubert's letters, can be startlingly erotic, Gray vividly brings to life this formidable woman's world and unmasks the astonishing sexual and social mores of nineteenth-century France. Written in a novelistic, richly detailed style but researched with meticulous scholarship, this biography portrays the complexities of a woman who ascended to fame and literary respectability through her talent and a willful spirit that refused to acknowledge the word 'no.'"
Edition: First editionBinding: Hard Back
Condition: Fine in Near Fine dj
ISBN: 0671742388
Book Id: 7600
Price: $14.00
