Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle
10 best books like Daughters of Decadence: Women Writers of the Fin-de-Siècle (Elaine Showalter): Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals, Journals and Letters, Women of the Left Bank, Shelley: The Pursuit, Wildly Romantic: The English Romantic Poets: The Mad, the Bad, and the Dangerous, The Late Lord Byron (Neversink), Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, Child of Light: Mary Shelley, The Wives: The Women Behind Russia's Literary Giants, Madame de Stäel
Beyond Power: On Women, Men and Morals
| Author | Marilyn French |
| ISBN | 0345334051 |
This book... did more to expand my thinking, raise my consciousness and anger.
With friends/family, I would bring up something I had just read in "Beyond Power" only to have her/him/them fight tooth and nail as to why it wasn't so. I would say, "Why don't you read it, French says it so much better...
| Author | Fanny Burney |
| ISBN | 0140436243 |
Novelist and playwright Frances (Fanny) Burney, 1752-1840, was also a prolific writer of journals and letters, beginning with the diary she started at fifteen and continuing until the end of her eventful life. From her youth in London high society to a period in the court of Queen Charlotte and her years...
| Author | Shari Benstock |
| ISBN | 0292790406 |
Now available in a durable paperback edition, Shari Benstock's critically acclaimed, best-selling Women of the Left Bank is a fascinating exploration of the lives and works of some two dozen American, English, and French women whose talent shaped the Paris expatriate experience in the century's...
| Author | Richard Holmes |
| ISBN | 1590170377 |
Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and...
| Author | Catherine M. Andronik |
| ISBN | 0805077839 |
Meet the rebellious young poets who brought about a literary revolution
Rock stars may think they invented sex, drugs, and rock and roll, but the Romantic poets truly created the mold.
In the early 1800s, poetry could land a person in jail. Those who tried to change the world through...
| Author | Doris Langley Moore |
| ISBN | 1935554484 |
“The best biography of Lord Byron ever written,” according to Poet Laureate W. S. Merwin, is now back in print after decades.
Of the hundreds of books on Byron and his work, not one has been devoted to the immediate aftermath of his life; and yet it is these first twenty posthumous years that...
| Author | Alexandra Harris |
| ISBN | 0500251711 |
In the 1930s and 1940s, while the battles for modern art and modern society were being fought in Paris and Spain, it seemed to some a betrayal that John Betjeman and John Piper were in love with a provincial world of old churches and tea shops.Alexandra Harris tells a different story: eclectically, passionately,
wittily,...
This is a biography of one of my favourite writers, written by another of my favourite writers. That said, I enjoyed it but was left a bit unsatisfied, feeling that we never quite get inside Mary's heart and mind. And maybe that's okay because maybe it's none of our business, really, but as she is dead and...
The six literary wives in the book, Anna Dostoevsky, Sophia Tolstoy, Véra Nabokov, Elena Bulgakov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, and Natalya Solzhenitsyn were muses, intellectual companions, and indispensable aids to Russia’s most celebrated writers. Popoff draws from the women’s autobiographical...
In her lifetime it was widely said that there were three political powers in Europe—Britain, Russia, and Madame de Stäel. Byron described her as "the first female writer of this, perhaps of any age," Germaine de Stäel was certainly the most remarkable woman of her time and she remains unique—both...
The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France
| Author | Asti Hustvedt |
| ISBN | 1890951072 |
In France at the end of the nineteenth century, progress and material prosperity coincided with widespread alarm about disease and decay. The obsessions of our own culture as the twentieth century came to a close resonate strikingly with those of the last fin-de-siecle: crime, pollution, sexually...
Pages from the Goncourt Journals
No evocation of Parisian life in the second half of the nineteenth century can match that found in the journals of the brothers Goncourt
The journal of the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt is one of the masterpieces of nineteenth-century French literature, a work that in its richness of...
| Author | Stephen Romer |
| ISBN | 0199569274 |
'He had become the dandy of the unpredictable.' A quest for new sensations, and an avowed desire to shock possessed the Decadent writers of fin-de-siècle Paris. The years 1880-1900 saw an extraordinary, hothouse flowering of talent, that produced some of the most exotic, stylized, and cerebral...
| Author | Roger Luckhurst |
| ISBN | 0192804804 |
The Victorian fin de siecle has many associations: the era of Decadence, The Yellow Book, the New Woman, the scandalous Oscar Wilde, the Empire on which the sun never set. This heady brew was caught nowhere better than in the revival of the Gothic tale in the late Victorian age, where the undead walked...
| Author | Adam Thirlwell |
| ISBN | 0374137226 |
Having slept with a prostitute in Egypt, a young French novelist named Gustave Flaubert at last abandons sentimentality and begins to write. He influences the obscure French writer Édouard Dujardin, who is read by James Joyce on the train to Trieste, where he will teach English to the Italian novelist...
| Author | Leon Edel |
| ISBN | 0006548687 |
This is the one-volume edition of a famous biography of Henry James, which includes new material. Born in America, Henry James was educated both there and in Europe before settling in London, where he was to spend most of his life, in 1876. His novels represent the culmination of the 19th-century realist...
Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918
These fascinating, never-before-published early diaries of Count Harry Kessler—patron, museum director, publisher, cultural critic, soldier, secret agent, and diplomat—present a sweeping panorama of the arts and politics of Belle Époque Europe, a glittering world poised to be changed...
| Author | James McNeill Whistler |
| ISBN | 0486218759 |
Whistler's Gentle Art, a classic in the literature of insult and denigration, might well be subtitled "The Autobiography of a Hater," for it contains the deadly sarcasm and stinging remarks of one of the wittiest men of the nineteenth century. Whistler not only refused to tolerate misunderstanding...
| Author | Alphonse Daudet |
| ISBN | 0375414851 |
As Julian Barnes writes in the introduction to his superb translation of Alphonse Daudet’s La Doulou, the mostly forgotten writer nowadays “ate at the top literary table” during his lifetime (1840–1897). Henry James described him as “the happiest novelist” and “the most charming...
Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture
| Author | Bram Dijkstra |
| ISBN | 0195056523 |
At the turn of the century, an unprecedented attack on women erupted in virtually every aspect of culture: literary, artistic, scientific, and philosophic. Throughout Europe and America, artists and intellectuals banded together to portray women as static and unindividuated beings who functioned...
| Author | Claire Tomalin |
| ISBN | 0140117156 |
Katherine Mansfield is the celebrated biography be bestselling author Claire Tomalin 'One of the best biographies I have ever read: a perfect match of author and subject. It should become a classic' Alison Lurie Pursuing art and adventure across Europe, Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote with the...
| Author | Isobel English |
| ISBN | 1574231995 |
This book is not a love letter, -- not to you, not to anyone.
But I love this book. I absolutely adore it, -- not just the content but the smallness of the book, the feel of it in my hands. The paper, like the prose, is delicate and crisp. You slip into Hatty's skin the way one slips into a white, cotton...
Wild Romance: A Victorian Story of a Marriage, a Trial, and a Self-Made Woman
| Author | Chloe Schama |
| ISBN | 0802717365 |
What started as a friendly conversation between a young girl, Theresa Longworth, and an army officer, William Charles Yelverton, on a steamer bound from France to England in 1852 would culminate nearly a decade later in one of the biggest public scandals the era had witnessed, with enormous implications...
| Author | Anka Muhlstein |
| ISBN | 1590514734 |
"Tell me where you eat, what you eat, and at what time you eat, and I will tell you who you are."
This is the motto of Anka Muhlstein's erudite and witty book about the ways food and the art of the table feature in Honoré de Balzac's The Human Comedy. Balzac uses them as a connecting thread in his novels,...
