Review: A Spear of Summer Grass

Title:  A Spear of Summer Grass

Author:  Deanna Raybourn
Publisher:  Harlequin/Mira
Pub Date:  April 30, 2013
How Acquired:  Through Net Galley

What it’s About:  The daughter of a scandalous mother, Delilah Drummond is already notorious, even among Paris society. But her latest scandal is big enough to make even her oft-married mother blanch. As punishment, Delilah is exiled to Kenya and her favorite stepfather's savanna manor house, Fairlight, until gossip subsides. Fairlight is the crumbling, sun-bleached skeleton of a faded African dream, a world where dissolute expats are bolstered by gin and jazz records, cigarettes and safaris. Against the frivolity of her peers, Ryder White stands in sharp contrast. As foreign to Delilah as Africa, Ryder becomes her guide to the complex beauty of this unknown world. Giraffes, buffalo, lions and elephants roam the shores of Lake Wanyama amid swirls of red dust. Here, life is lush and teeming—yet fleeting and often cheap.

Amidst the wonders—and dangers—of Africa, Delilah awakes to a land out of all proportion: extremes of heat, darkness, beauty and joy that cut to her very heart. Only when this sacred place is profaned by bloodshed does Delilah discover what is truly worth fighting for—and what she can no longer live without.

Why you should buy it:  I’ve been interested in British Africa between the wars, ever since I saw the film White Mischief.  So when I read that one of my favorite writers, Deanna Raybourn, had a book coming out set in that time period, I couldn’t wait to read it.  I started the book on Saturday on my bus ride to Boston and couldn’t put it down.  From the moment that Delilah set her dainty foot on African soil, I was completely mesmerized.  I read it on the T, at dinner, during intermission at the Lyric Stage Company, before bed, and kept on reading it until I finished it on the bus ride back home to New York.  And then I was depressed, because the book was done and I had to say good-bye to Delilah and Ryder, two of the most interesting characters that I have met in historical fiction in a long time. Not even the knowledge that Raybourn has another book coming out set during the same time period could assuage my grief.  This book made me want to immediately book a safari in Africa but the Abercrombie & Fitch kind with the air-conditioned tents, and four star cuisine. 

What can I say about Delilah Drummond that hasn’t already been said by critics who have universally acclaimed A Spear of Summer Grass? Delilah is spoiled, petulant, impulsive, promiscuous, vain, sarcastic, intelligent, and too stubborn for her own good. It takes her forever to admit what we, the reader already knows, that she has not only fallen in love with Ryder White, but she has fallen head over heels in love with Africa.  Oh, and I have mentioned that she is fiendishly loyal to both ex-husbands and friends?  There times when I wanted to throttle Delilah, particularly when she is being beastly to her cousin Dodo.  But as Delilah grew and changed, so did my feelings towards her.  Delilah is like an onion, the book slowly peels back the layers to reveal the pain underneath.  Like many people, Delilah’s life was marked by the First World War.  She’s been trying to mask the pain by dancing, drinking and shagging the night away. By the time she does an impulsively heroic act towards the end of the book, I wanted to be her best friend.

And then there is Ryder White.  Be still my foolish heart, if it were possible to marry a fictional character, I would want to marry Ryder White.  How can one resist a man who can quote Walt Whitman? A man who can take down a lion with ease but who respects nature, the land and the natives? A man who is also kind and generous as well as being stubborn and proud? Ryder is a man’s man, handsome, brave and a little rough around the edges (all those years living in the Yukon and Africa).  He has been through a great deal of pain in his life but he doesn’t let it define him.  In fact, before you read Spear of Summer Grass, I suggest you read Raybourn’s prequel novella Far in the Wilds for a glimpse of Ryder before the novel starts.  I guarantee you will fall just as madly in love with Ryder as I have.

In fact, all the characters in this book are wonderfully flawed and deliciously quirky, including Tusker, Ryder’s aunt, Kit, the promiscuous self-absorbed artist, Rex and Helen, the long married couple with secrets, and Gideon and Moses.  I could gush all day about the wonderful scenes between Gideon, a Masai warrior who becomes Delilah’s protector and friend, and Delilah.  All these characters have suffered something whether it is loss of a loved one, or the pain of being a spinster.   It is Africa that heals them, that gives purpose and meaning to their lives.  Raybourn doesn’t shy away from describing just how hard life in Africa was, how few modern conveniences, the tensions between the colonialists and the natives, and the differing viewpoints on what direction Kenya or British East Africa should go in.  To the Europeans, Africa was their Wild West, the final frontier.  I do agree with some reviewers who felt that the political situation in Kenya is rather glossed over.  I’m still a little unsure as to what was going on at the time.  And I’m not sure that the novel needed a murder mystery.  It occurred so late in the book, that the denouement seemed rushed to me.  The book is at its best when the focus is on Delilah’s relationship with Africa, and her developing relationship with Ryder.

At first when I was reading the book, I tried to imagine what real life characters that lived in Kenya in the early 20^th century Raybourn might have based her characters on.  After a while I was so entranced by the story, that I started imagining what actors might play what roles in the miniseries (please make this happen).  I definitely see Hayley Atwell (Captain America) as Delilah, Laura Carmichael (Lady Edith in Downton Abbey) as Dodo and Judi Dench as Tusker.  Who should play Ryder is the tricky one; I would have said Clive Owen about ten years ago or even Russell Crowe when I still liked him.  If Jonathan Cake were a big enough star, I would say that he would make an excellent Ryder as would Richard Armitage, if he lightened his hair.

The verdict:  A powerful and poignant novel about redemption and the human spirit told by a master storyteller.

The Girl Who Loved Camellia’s - The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis

Title:  The Girl Who Loved Camellia’s - The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis

Author:  Julie Kavanagh
Publisher:  Knopf
Pub Date:  June 11, 2013
How Acquired:  Through Edelweiss

What it’s about:  The astonishing and unknown story of Marie Duplessis, the courtesan who inspired Alexandre Dumas fils’s novel and play La dame aux camélias, Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata, George Cukor’s film Camille, and Frederick Ashton’s ballet Marguerite and Armand. Fascinating to both men and women, Marie, with her stylish outfits and signature camellias, was always a subject of great interest at the opera or at the Café de Paris, where she sat at the table of the director of the Paris Opéra, along with the director of the Théâtre Variétés, and others. Her early death at age twenty-three from tuberculosis created an outpouring of sympathy, noted by Charles Dickens, who wrote in February 1847: “For several days all questions political, artistic, commercial have been abandoned by the papers. Everything is erased in the face of an incident which is far more important, the romantic death of one of the glories of the demi-monde, the beautiful, the famous Marie Duplessis.”  

About the Author:  Julie Kavanagh is the author of Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton and Nureyev. She was trained as a dancer at the Royal Ballet Junior School, graduated from Oxford, and has been the arts editor of Harpers & Queen, a dance critic at The Spectator, and London editor of both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. She is currently a writer and contributing editor for The Economist’s cultural magazine, Intelligent Life.

My thoughts:  One of the first women that I wrote about on the blog way back in 2007 was Marie Duplessis.  Like many of the women that I’ve written about, I’ve long been a little obsessed, ever since I saw the film of Camille with Greta Garbo when I was a teenager.  As soon as I learned that it was based on a novel, of course I had to read it.  Thanks to the helpful introduction, I learned that the novel was based on an actual person, Marie Duplessis or as she was known as a child, Alphonsine Plessis.  Back in high school, there was no such thing as the internet (I know it’s hard to believe.  How did we ever live without it?), so I was never able to do much research on Marie’s life.  I did however read the original play and also Pam Gem’s adaptation.  And who hasn’t seen the movie with Greta Scacchi and a young Colin Firth as Armand? (If you haven’t, it’s available on DVD!).  I had wanted to include Marie in Scandalous Women but unfortunately she ended up on the cutting room floor.  My word count was so short that I had to limit myself to only 35 women.

So I was excited and a little bit jealous that Julie Kavanagh had written a biography of Marie. When I was doing my research on Marie for my post, the only two books that had any real information on her was Virginia Rounding’s The Grand Horizontales and Joanna Richardson’s book Courtesans.  Digging deep into the archives at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris as well as brushing up on her French, Kavanagh has been able to dig deep into Marie’s past in Normandy to reveal more information about her early life. Born Alphonsine Rose Plessis, her early life was a Dickensian nightmare.  Drunken brute of a father who may have sexually as well as physically abused her, a mother who died young, Marie learned how to take care of herself from an early age.  As soon as she could, she left Normandy for Paris, where she worked in a millinery shop before taking her first tentative steps into the world of the demi-monde. 

Kavanagh does a remarkable job not only of giving the bare facts of Marie’s life but she takes the reader on a journey into Paris in the last years of Louis-Philippe’s reign.  It’s the Paris of Les Miserables, before the sweeping changes made by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann.  In the 19^th century, Paris was the place to be for culture, painters such as Coubert and Delacroix, the romantic ballets Giselle and La Sylphide premiered in Paris, writers such as Hugo, George Sand, Balzac and Theophile Gautier.  Like London, Paris also saw the rise of the bourgeois, men who made their money working as lawyers, doctors, inventors, and industrialists.  No longer was Paris the playground solely of the aristocracy.

The Girl Who Loved Camellia’s is not just a biography of one of the most well-known courtesans of the early 19^th century but also a social biography of a time period in French history that is not often written about compared to the La Belle Époque era or the era of the Impressionists.  One of the hardest things to do in a biography is to give not only a sense of who the subject was but why he or she was so popular during their lifetime. What impressed me the most was how Kavanagh was able to convey that unique something that Marie had that made her unique in Paris, a combination of innocence and sensuality.   Despite her profession, Marie never seemed to be bitter or jaded.  Even her taste for luxury seems more innocent that avaricious.  Kavanagh quotes liberally from both Dumas fils’s novel as well as the biography of Marie written by Romain Vienne, an old friend from Normandy who moved to Paris to work as a journalist at the same time that Marie was making her name as a courtesan, which gives an immediate and intimate look at who she was as a person. 

At one point in the book, Kavanagh draws a parallel between Marie and Lola Montez who was an acquaintance of Marie’s in Paris.  While Lola was brash, bold, and seemingly fearless, Marie was altogether more demure and lady-like.  Yet they came from similar backgrounds and managed to reinvent themselves.  Neither woman had a real Pygmalion figure in their lives that molded them.  Marie learned by watching her betters so to speak.   Not only did Marie have a desire to learn, but being a successful courtesan meant that one needed to be able to carry on a conversation with wit and intelligence.  At the time of her death, Marie’s library contained 200 volumes but one of the books that she read the most was Abbe Prevost’s novel Manon Lescaut, the story of a young courtesan who dies tragically.

Perhaps one of the reasons that Marie’s story continues to fascinate whether in fiction or film or opera is because she died so tragically young of consumption at the age of 23.  She never grew old and suffered the fate of other courtesans such as Cora Pearl.  Like James Dean, she’s forever young.  My only quibble with Kavanagh’s book is that I wish she had taken the book further and written more about Marie’s impact and influence on Dumas fils’s novel and play, the Verdi opera, Cukor’s famous film or even the ballets that have been inspired by Marie’s life.  There is a little bit in the beginning of the book but I found myself wishing for more.

Verdict:  A brilliant recreation of the short, intense, and passionate life of the courtesan who inspired some of the world’s most romantic and tragic literature.

The Many Lives of Beryl Markham

“A life has to move or it stagnates. Even this life, I think. Every tomorrow ought not to resemble every yesterday.” – Beryl Markham

 

Two of my favorite writers, Lauren Willig and Deanna Raybourn, have writers have novels set in Kenya during the 1920’s. I have previously written about some of the denizens of the Happy Valley Set (Alice de Janze, Idina Sackville) before but I was all of a sudden inspired to read more about Beryl Markham. Way back in the 1980’s, after OUT OF AFRICA was released, there was a miniseries on CBS called SHADOW ON THE SUN starring Stephanie Powers as Markham. I vaguely remember a scene were Powers as Markham says “I’ve flown the Atlantic” in a really terrible English accent. Born in England but raised in Kenya, Beryl Markham was a notorious beauty. She trained race horses and had scandalous affairs, but she is most remembered for being a pioneering aviatrix. She became the first woman to cross the Atlantic Ocean and the first person to make it from London to New York nonstop. She also left the world an amazing memoir ‘West with the Night’ which was re-released in 1983, forty years after its initial publication, reintroducing the world to the fascinating life of Beryl Markham.

She was born Beryl Clutterbuck in on October 26, 1902 in the village of Ashwell in Leicestershire, the youngest child of Charles and Clare Clutterbuck. When she was a toddler, her father moved to Kenya, where he had purchased a farm in Njoro. Once he was settled, he sent for Beryl, her mother and her older brother Richard. Beryl was four years old at the time. Unfortunately her mother couldn’t stand the isolation and promptly returned to England, taking Beryl’s older brother with her. Beryl wouldn’t see her mother again until she was an adult. Beryl never forgave her mother for abandoning her; it colored her relationships with women for the rest of her life. Of course, she hero-worshipped her father; he could do no wrong in her eyes. She would compare every man she fell in love with to her father, most of whom were found wanting in the end.

 

With her father busy training and racing horses, Beryl was basically left to raise herself; her only company the African servants who worked on the farm. Left mainly to her own devices, Beryl grew up wild, running barefoot, without the restrictions and conventions of a traditional English upbringing, which she referred to as “a world without walls.” She spent her days in the company of animals and the local tribes. Her first language was Swahili not English. She was the only white woman permitted to hunt with the male warriors, and she was equally adept with both a spear and a rifle. In many ways, her sensibilities were more African than European. She didn’t treat the Africans who worked for her father as inferior. She learned their languages and absorbed their love of the land. Later on, her father hired a governess, a woman named Mrs. Orchardson. Beryl hated her, particularly after her father and Mrs. Orchardson formed a liaison. She preferred to live in a mud hut and later on her own house on the farm, rather than live under the same roof as Mrs. Orchardson. Her dislike didn’t extend to Mrs. Orchardson’s son Arthur, who became a playmate and later on, worked for Beryl as a jockey.

From childhood, Beryl had an affinity for animals, particularly horses. She could calm even the most recalcitrant horses. In her 84 years on the plant, Beryl’s great loves would be her father, horses and Africa. Although she only had 2 ½ years of actual schooling in Nairobi until she was kicked out for being a bad influence, Beryl was always a great reader throughout her life, thanks to both her father and lovers such as Denys Finch-Hatton and Tom Campbell-Black. Her upbringing meant that Beryl would never be a conventional Englishwoman. It also meant that she grew up practicing the art of survival, that “the end justifies the means.” She could be ruthless and amoral, using people and then discarding them. She often took advantage of friends, running up huge bills on their accounts, without guilt. Outwardly confident, she was also deeply insecure. Blessed with abundant charm, it was hard for her friends to stay mad at her for long.

 

As an adult, Beryl was almost six feet tall, blonde, blue-eyed with the figure of a super model. Although she grew up a tomboy, Beryl was also incredibly feminine. She loved perfume, ointments, and lotions. She also had regular manicures and salon appointments all throughout her life. All of her clothes were beautifully cut, trousers that emphasized the length of her legs, worn with silk shirts which became her trademark. She wore a great deal of white which emphasized her tan, and her blonde hair. She was striking more than beautiful, with a vibrant personality. When she walked into a room, heads turned. The first woman to earn a license as a horse trainer in not just in Kenya but England as well, Beryl spent most of her time around men and animals. She had few female friends, but those she did have like Karen Blixen, tended to be more maternal, treating her more like an errant daughter.

Beryl was married three times, none of them successful. She married for the first time just before her 17^th birthday to Jock Purves, an ex-soldier turned farmer, who was twice her age. The marriage like her other two foundered under the weight of Beryl’s infidelities. Beryl didn’t know the first thing about the responsibilities of being a wife, nor did she grow up with many examples of a good marriage. Her father lived with a married woman, her mother remarried while abroad, and all around her Beryl saw casual infidelities. The members of the Happy Valley Sets swapped partners the way other people swapped recipes. Beryl was also fundamentally selfish and too independent to be confined in marriage. Some biographers claim that Beryl’s third husband, journalist and ghost writer Raoul Schumacher, may have been the actual author of her memoir West with the Night, although Mary S. Lovell in her wonderful biography Straight On Till Morning disputes that claim. If it were true, it would be the only thing that he contributed during their short marriage. Nor did motherhood interest her. She gave birth to her only child, a son Gervase, during her second marriage to Mansfield Markham. After he was born, she dropped off with her mother-in-law who essentially raised him. Occasionally she would visit her son, if she happened to be in England. She saw him for the final time soon after he married in 1955. She never saw him again after that, nor did she ever meet her granddaughters.

A clairvoyant once told Beryl that while she would have great success in life, she would never be truly happy. She never forgot it. Beryl treated sex more like a man, as a necessary function like brushing one’s teeth, or eating. Very few of her lovers touched her heart. She had a scandalous affair with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester. The son of George V, Beryl met him when he accompanied his brother, the Prince of Wales on safari. Unfortunately they were not very discreet. When Beryl’s husband at the time, Mansfield Markham found out, he threatened to sue for divorce and name the Prince as a correspondent. In order to keep his name name out of the courts, Prince Henry agreed to put £15,000 into at trust for Beryl, which would pay her an annuity for the rest of her life. The only two men, besides her father, that Beryl ever really loved were Denys Finch-Hatton and Tom Campbell-Black. Both men inspired in her a love of flying and both affairs ended in tragedy. Beryl’s relationship with Finch-Hatton started soon after his affair with Karen Blixen ended, although some of Blixen’s friends believe that Beryl stole him from her. Finch-Hatton introduced her to music and literature, in many ways they were perfect for each other. Neither one had any interest in getting married, or leading a conventional life. Who knows where their relationship might have gone if he hadn’t died in a plane crash.

If anyone could be considered the love of Beryl’s life it would be Tom Campbell-Black. Like Denys Finch-Hatton, he was someone that she had known most of her life. It was he who made sure that she had a thorough education before she took her first solo flight. He made sure that she strip down and repair an airplane engine, how to replace spark plugs, and how to clear jets. She learned how to read maps and to have a thorough knowledge of the instruments. As she did when she was training horses, Beryl kept meticulous records of all her flights. It took 18 months, and a thousand hours in the air; but she soon became the first woman to earn a commercial pilot’s license. From the beginning, flying appealed to her sense of adventure. She ferried people to distant farms, flew mail routes, rescued pilots who had crashed, acted as a spotter for the big game hunters, an an informal air-ambulance service, and could tell from the air where herds of elephants were. This was at a time when air travel was still in its infancy; Beryl often flew with no radio or air-speed indicator, and very few instruments. She was fearless, whether in the air, or riding horses. She even surprised Tom by flying from Nairobi to England solo! While horse racing had been a man’s game, flying was wide open to both men and women. By the time Beryl became interested in flying, several women had already made names for themselves, Amelia Earhart, Amy Johnson, Jackie Cochran and Mary, Duchess of Bedford among them.

In 1936, Beryl Markham became the first woman to fly solo and nonstop from east to west across the Atlantic. No one had made a successful non-stop flight from England to North America, and no woman had crossed the Atlantic from east to west. Amelia Earhart had flown successfully solo across the Atlantic, but she had done it from North America, which was considered the ‘easy way.’ Before the flight, Beryl trained like an athlete, giving up smoking and drinking, and exercising daily to build up her stamina. She pored over maps for hours, plotting what the best route was across the ocean. There were so many factors to consider. She needed a grand total of 6 fuel tanks to make it, if the weather cooperated. For inspiration, Beryl would often visit the factory in Gravesend, England to watch her plane, The Messenger, being built.

She left on Friday, September 4, 1936, after waiting several days for the weather to clear. The crossing was rough from the beginning. Headwinds were driving hard against the plane, reducing her speed to only 90 miles an hour. Four hours in, one of the engines quit, and the first fuel tank was empty. She flew blind for nineteen hours before she crash landed in a peat bog in Nova Scotia, leaving the plane badly damaged. She was lucky to walk away from the nose-in crash with only a small head injury. Despite the fact that she didn’t make it to New York, she was feted and lionized for her daring and skill. Beryl Markham was now a hero. Ironically, one of the reasons that Beryl attempted the flight was to impress Tom Campbell-Black who had surprised her by falling in love and marrying another woman while abroad in England. Beryl hoped that her feat would bring him back to her arms. Unfortunately, Tom Campbell-Black was killed in a freak accident before Beryl could make her case.

 

Without Campbell-Black to guide and motivate her, Beryl lost interest in flying. She spent the war years in California, doing some work as a technical advisor on a film entitled Safari. She wrote West with the Night in 1942, but although the critics raved, it was not a popular success. There was interest in making a movie about Beryl’s transatlantic flight, starring Beryl, but her screen test proved to be a bust. Finally, in the 1950’s, Beryl returned to Kenya and her first love, horses. For the next twenty years she had great success training and racing horses, including 6 Kenya Derby winners. Unfortunately for Beryl she spent too much time on the horses, and not enough time on her finances. Beryl had lived her life just assuming that money would turn up when she needed it. By 1980, she was living in squalor with just a few horses. But like the mythical Phoenix that is a symbol of the sign of Scorpio, Beryl rose from the ashes once again. The 1983 republication of her memoir West with the Night brought her new found fame and allowed her to live her remaining years in comfort.

After a brief bout with pneumonia, Beryl Markham passed away on August 3, 1986. She was 83 years old.

For further reading:Mary S. Lovell, Straight on Till Morning: The Biography of Beryl Markham. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1987. ISBN 0-312-01096-6

Errol Trzebinski, The Lives of Beryl Markham. New York: W.W. Norton. 1993. ISBN 0-393-03556-5.

Napoleon's Women: The Life of Madame de Stael

In her lifetime, it was said there were three great powers in Europe: Britain, Russia and Madame de Staël.  She was a political and literary intellectual giant in an age when women weren't expected to be either.  She was also crucial in putting together the coalition that brought down Napoleon, most of the important treaty negotiations between Russia and Sweden against Napoleon were conducted through Madame de Staël.  After Napoleon's fall, her salon in Paris was where the attempts at constitutional monarchy were framed. She was also an accomplished writer of novels (Delphine, Corrine or Italy), travel writing (her three volume work ‘On Germany’ was heralded at the time), pamphleteer (she wrote a spirited defense of Marie Antoinette) and literary critic (On Literature) who pretty much invented comparative literature. During the reign of terror, Germaine used her status as a Swiss citizen to save the lives of at least a dozen people.  Unlike her contemporaries Fanny Burney and Jane Austen (who she had no use for), Madame de Staël is not as well known today as they are.  Her colorful life seems to have overshadowed her very real contributions to literature.

She was born Anne Louise Germaine Necker on April 22, 1766, the only child of Jacques and Suzanne Necker.  Germaine’s mother was something of an 18^th century Tiger Mom, determined that her little darling would be the most brilliant and articulate child in France.  From an early age, Germaine had a steady diet of mathematics, philosophy, religion, and languages.  By the age of 3, she could already recite her catechism.  Suzanne was a devotee of Rousseau, but she seems to have read the abridged version of his work because she kept Germaine isolated from other children, worried that they might corrupt her child.  The upshot was that Germaine suffered a nervous collapse at the age of 12 from overwork.  Her doctors prescribed plenty of rest in the country, and play dates with children her own age which her mother reluctantly agreed too. The one good thing her mother did for was invite her to her salons (where she was instructed to be seen and not heard) where she was able to listen to some of the most brilliant minds of the day such as the Abbé Raynal, Marmontel, Buffon, and Jean-Francois de la Harpe. For the rest of her life, Germaine resented her mother for working her to death and her lack of affection.

The only thing that she and her mother had in common was their love and devotion to Jacques Necker, a Swiss Protestant who rose from unimportant clerk to the Director of Finance under Louis XVI (it was said that his dismissal in 1788 was one of the causes of the storming of the Bastille).  Suzanne was devoted to him since he rescued her from a life of spinsterhood as a governess after a thwarted romance with the historian Edward Gibbons. She would do whatever she could to promote his career, including holding a Friday night salon in Paris, training herself to become an interesting conversationalist, which did not come naturally to her.  Germaine loved him and he doted on her and adored his only child who he nicknamed ‘Minette’.  For many years, she considered him to be the love of her life, although all of her lovers were the complete opposite of her sober, puritanical father.

Germaine was striking rather than beautiful with a flamboyant style of dress (girlfriend knew how to rock a turban).  She was tall, but rather clumsy (she tripped over her train when she made her debut at court and fell on her face) with abundant black hair, large hazel eyes, beautiful shoulders, and a generous bosom.  While not a great beauty, she was also good-humored, vivacious and more important, a witty conversationalist, not afraid to share her opinions, the exact opposite of her mother.  And to put the cherry on top of the cake, she was the richest heiress in France.  A host of suitors showed up at the Necker front door, including William Pitt the younger, who was turned down because Germaine didn’t want to live so far away from her two great loves: Paris and her daddy.  If she had, she would have been the wife of the youngest Prime Minister in British history.

 Instead the winner of her hand was Erik Magnus Staël von Holstein, a nobleman eighteen years her senior, who was first attaché of the Swedish legation.  He also had a gambling problem which made Necker think twice about having him as a son-in-law.  He would only agree to the marriage if the King of Sweden promised to make de Staël lifetime ambassador to France and a title.  In return, Sweden received several acres of land on St. Bart’s.  Germaine was now the Baroness de Stael, and the wife of an ambassador, a much higher position at court and in society than she would have achieved by marrying a Frenchman.  However it was Germaine who proved the more effective envoy.  She wrote long letters to the Gustavus IV of Sweden, reporting on the progress of the reformist ideas that were circulating in her salons.

The couple was soon living separate lives.  Germaine consoled herself by creating one of the most brilliant salons in Paris.  Unlike her mother’s salon which was created mainly to promote Necker, Germaine’s salon gathered some of the most brilliant minds of pre-revolutionary France including Talleyrand, Abbé Delille, Clermont-Tonnerre, and Gouverneur Morris.  Later on in Switzerland during the terror and her long exiles, she turned the family chateau at Coppet, into an intellectual powerhouse and asylum for those who opposed Napoleon.  Germaine knew or became good friends with most of the intelligentsia of late 18^th and early 19^th century Europe including Byron, Schiller, Goethe, Chateaubriand, the Duke of Wellington, Fanny Burney (until her father forbid her to associate with Germaine) and Juliette Recamier (one of her closest friends). After the Terror, her salon served as a resort for all the restless politicians of the day and she was once considered a person dangerous to the state. She hosted dinner parties where she invited people with varying opinions and on other days she entertained separately the leaders of the various cliques. 

Germaine became intimate friends with among others Talleyrand, Narbonne, and the Swiss-born politician Benjamin Constant.  Constant came closest to being both the intellectual equal as well as the ardent lover that Germaine had searched for her entire life. Of her five children, only one could be said to be definitively her husband’s.  She also had a large entourage of admirers, who orbited around her, hoping against hope that they would get the chance to be more than just a friend.  Although she was considered plain by some, Germaine clearly had sex appeal.  She was also apparently a demanding lover. “I have never known a woman who was more continuously exacting…Everybody’s entire existence, every hour, every minute, for years on end, must be at her disposition, or else there is an explosion like all thunderstorms and earthquakes put together,” Benjamin Constant once wrote.  And he lived with her on and off for seventeen years!  Even after he secretly married, he found it hard to tear himself away from Germaine.  The two of them forged an intellectual and romantic partnership that was also incredibly co-dependent.  It was a classic love/hate relationship.  Frankly Germaine sounds both exhilarating as well as exhausting.  One of her biographers, Francine du Plessix Gray, speculates that Germaine may have suffered from manic depression. Her final companion was John Rocca, a handsome but poorly educated former Swiss soldier half her age, who she married secretly (her husband had died in 1802) who she referred to as ‘nothing but a little Scottish melody in my life’.

And then there was that little feud with Napoleon.  Germaine was fully prepared to jump on the ‘Napoleon is Great!’ bandwagon when she first met him but he was immune to her charms, nor was he interested in hearing her ideas of how to make France great.  At their first meeting, she asked him who he thought was the greatest woman in history, he told her that it was the woman who’d had the most children. Napoleon was a misogynist at heart; he disliked intellectual, mouthy women.  He preferred submissive, feminine women, more like his wife Josephine or his later mistress Marie Walewska.  He once leaned over and remarked leeringly at her cleavage, remarking that she must have breast-fed her children.  As Napoleon’s power grew, so did Germaine’s opposition to what became his dictatorship.  Her own preference was for a moderate republic or a constitutional monarchy.  Unfortunately for Germaine, she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, encouraging Constant to speak in opposition of certain government proposals, although he was strongly advised not to do so by others. Napoleon never forgave her for Constant’s speech and in retaliation, he not only spied on her, censored her books,  actually pulping one in mid-printing (On Germany), threatened her with prison, and also exiled her from France on at least three separate occasions between 1803 and 1812.

During her time in exile, she did some of her finest writing. Her novel Corinne or Italy, published in 1807 had a huge impact on women readers outside of France.  Corinne’s heroine broke the mold, as a  woman and as an artist; she was beautiful, imperious, highly strung and emotionally vulnerable.  Many young women consciously modeled themselves after Corinne, including Byron’s Italian mistress Teresa Guiccioli, the British poet Felicia Hemans and Margaret Fuller. Corinne became an international symbol of Romanticism, just as much as Goethe’s Werther.  The novel outsold the works of Sir Walter Scott, has never been out of print since.

In On Germany, Germaine compared and contrasted the differences between southern European literature, which stressed classical style, intellectual rationalism, and antiquity, and northern literature, which emphasized emotionalism, folklore, and nationalistic themes. While praising both, she advocated for a spreading of the northern, romantic variety. She also stressed the concept of nature as a cosmic oneness expressible through literature, especially poetry. These notions profoundly influenced Chateaubriand, François-René, Byron, Emerson, and countless other writers and thinkers around the world.

During her final years, Germaine began to suffer from intense stomach pains, probably from years of opium abuse.  After a cerebral stroke left her paralyzed, she died on July 14, 1817 (Bastille Day) at the age of 51.  Her young husband survived her by only six months before he died from tuberculosis.

Further reading:

Francine du Plessix Gray, Madame de Staël:  The First Modern Woman, Atlas & Co., 2008

Maria Fairweather, Madame de Staël. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005

Christopher J. Herold, Mistress to an Age: A Life of Madame de Staël. New York: Grove Press, 2002

Renee Winegarten, Germaine de Staël & Benjamin Constant: a Dual Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008 (ISBN 9780300119251).

Book of the Month: Mistress of My Fate by Hallie Rubenhold

Title:  Mistress of My Fate (The Confessions of Henrietta Lightfoot)

Author:   Hallie Rubenhold
Publisher:  Grand Central Publishing
Pub Date:  January 8, 2013

What it’s About:  Set during a period of revolution and turmoil, Mistress of My Fate is the first book in a trilogy about Henrietta Lightfoot, a young woman who was abandoned as a baby and raised alongside her cousins, noble children of a lord and lady. At just sixteen years old, circumstance and a passionate love affair tear Henrietta away from everything she knows, leading to a new life fending for herself on the streets of 18th century London as a courtesan, gambler, and spirited intellect of the city.

About the Author: 

Hallie Rubenhold is an historian and broadcaster and an authority on British eighteenth-century social history. She has written two works of non-fiction to critical acclaim: The Convent Garden Ladies and Lady Worsley's Whim: An Eighteenth-Century Tale of Sex, Scandal and Divorce. In addition to writing books, articles and reviews, Hallie regularly appears on TV in the UK as an expert contributor to documentaries. Hallie lives in London with her husband.

Why you should buy it:   I was lucky enough to get a cover blurb from Hallie Rubenhold when Scandalous Women was about to come out two years ago (has it really been that long?), so when she contacted me and offered me the chance to review Mistress of My Fate, I jumped at the chance.  Unfortunately life intervened, and it’s only until now that I actually had the chance to sit down and read the book over the long Easter weekend.

Mistress of My Fate is juicy page-turning adventure reminiscent of Richardson’s Clarissa with a few gothic overtones thrown in for good measure.  Narrated by Henrietta herself, the novel is told in a witty, confessional style, drawing in the reader with rich details of the 18^th century to great effect.  Raised in the country, Henrietta Ingerton is an orphan, the niece of the Earl and Countess of Stavourley, raised alongside her more noble cousins.  From childhood, Henrietta is aware that due to her station in life, the best she can hope for is marriage to the local vicar or to spend her life as the spinster companion to dazzling but spoilt cousin Lady Catherine.  Her life is turned upside down when she meets Lord Allenham who is courting her cousin.  She falls deeply in love with him and to her shock and surprise her feelings are returned.  However Allenham’s estate is heavily in debt and he needs Lady Catherine’s dowry to restore it to its former glory.  The fickle finger of fate intervenes and Henrietta’s life is turned upside down.  

She learns the truth of her parentage, and is suspected of murder.  When her uncle proposes that she marry against her wishes, she flees first to her beloved and then to London where somewhat naïvely becomes a member of the demimonde.  She makes her way through London's gambling halls, ballrooms and bedrooms, before finally taking matters and her life into her own hands.

I enjoyed this book tremendously but I have to confess that there were times that I wanted to shake Henrietta; she wandered occasionally into the Too Stupid to Live territory.  I began to wonder if Henrietta was a little bit too sweet, innocent and trusting for her own good.  On the other hand, it was nice to see a heroine who didn’t instantly become jaded.  Henrietta’s relationship with Allenham is almost too good to be true, they read Rousseau and Goethe together, and he appreciates not just her intelligence but her talent as an artist as well.  Henrietta becomes enamored of The Sorrows of Young Werther after Allenham mentions the book to her.  She becomes obsessed with it and the parallels to the love triangle between herself, Allenham and Lady Catherine. It’s not until the final third of the book that Henrietta finally becomes the mistress of her fate.  For most of the book, she seems to make reckless and rash decisions without really thinking things through.  When she arrives in London, she tends to ignore the advice of her more worldly friends.

The book for me really took off once Henrietta, who becomes fearful and paranoid when Allenham disappears, runs off recklessly to London to find him.  Rubenhold proceeds to dirty up Henrietta a bit, slowly peeling away her innocence and naiveté as she’s forced to survive the only way a woman in her position could at that time, by becoming a member of the demimonde where she consorts with some of the most notorious rakes and birds of paradise in 18^th century London including Gertrude Mahon and Elizabeth Armistead.  She even makes the acquaintance of some of London’s leading actors such as Sarah Siddons and Mrs. Jordan when Henrietta is forced by her new protector to play the role of Maria in a production of School for Scandal (I confess that this was one of my favorite parts of the book).

It will be interesting to see what happens to Henrietta in the second volume as the 18^th century comes to a close, and she experiences the dawn of the Regency era.

Verdict:  A wonderful journey through the late 18th century, filled with fascinatingly juicy historical details, a passionate love story, and a heroine who learns to learns to take control of her own life.