The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis
10 best books like The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis (Julie Kavanagh): Dawn of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Monet, Zola, Bernhardt, Eiffel, Debussy, Clemenceau, and Their Friends, Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century Courtesans, The Woman Before Wallis: Prince Edward, the Parisian Courtesan, and the Perfect Murder, Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life, Bluebird, or The Invention of Happiness, Wildly Romantic: The English Romantic Poets: The Mad, the Bad, and the Dangerous, John Keats: A New Life, George Eliot: The Last Victorian, Paris Reborn: Napoléon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Quest to Build a Modern City, The Delighted States
| Author | Mary McAuliffe |
| ISBN | 1442209275 |
A humiliating military defeat by Bismarck's Germany, a brutal siege, and a bloody uprising Paris in 1871 was a shambles, and the question loomed, "Could this extraordinary city even survive?" Mary McAuliffe takes the reader back to these perilous years following the abrupt collapse of the Second...
Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century Courtesans
| Author | Virginia Rounding |
| ISBN | 1582344507 |
In nineteenth-century Paris, the pampered demimonde became almost indistinguishable from the haut monde, with mythical reputations growing up around its most alluring and favored celebrities. Grandes Horizantales examines the lives of four of the era's best-known courtesans-Marie Duplessis,...
| Author | Andrew Rose |
| ISBN | 1250041333 |
From the glittering dance halls of Paris during World War I to the maisons de rendezvous, luxurious châteaus in the French countryside, The Woman Before Wallis recounts the untold story of Prince Edward's tempestuous affair with a Parisian courtesan and the scandalous aftermath that has remained...
| Author | Hermione Lee |
| ISBN | 0701184957 |
Penelope Fitzgerald (1916–2000) was a great English writer, who would never have described herself in such grand terms. Her novels were short, spare masterpieces, self-concealing, oblique and subtle. She won the Booker Prize for her novel Offshore in 1979, and her last work, The Blue Flower, was...
| Author | Sheila Kohler |
| ISBN | 1590512626 |
Bluebird, or The Invention of Happiness is a radiant and artful novel based on the life of Lucy Dillon, an 18th-century French aristocrat. Her intelligence, beauty, and lack of pretension made Lucy a favorite of luminaries like Talleyrand and Germaine de Stael — and equipped her to survive the "Terror"...
| 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 | Nicholas Roe |
| ISBN | 0300124651 |
This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly sensitive, tragic figure. Instead, Nicholas Roe reveals the real flesh-and-blood poet: a passionate man driven by ambition but prey to doubt, suspicion, and jealousy; sure...
| Author | Kathryn Hughes |
| ISBN | 0815411219 |
Mary Ann Evans, aka George Eliot (1819-1880) achieved lasting renown with the novels Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Adam Bede. Her masterworks were written after years of living an unconventional life, including a scandalous voyage to Europe with the married writer and editor George Henry Lewes....
| Author | Stephane Kirkland |
| ISBN | 0312626894 |
Stephane Kirkland gives an engrossing account of Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and one of the greatest transformations of a major city in modern history
Traditionally known as a dirty, congested, and dangerous city, 19th Century Paris, France was transformed in an extraordinary period...
| 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...
For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus
| Author | Frederick Brown |
| ISBN | 0307266311 |
Frederick Brown, cultural historian, author of acclaimed biographies of Émile Zola (“Magnificent”—The New Yorker) and Flaubert (“Splendid . . . Intellectually nuanced, exquisitely written”—The New Republic) now gives us an ambitious, far-reaching book—a perfect joining...
Queen Bee of Tuscany: The Redoubtable Janet Ross
| Author | Ben Downing |
| ISBN | 0374239711 |
"Quite simply one of the best books of the year." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
Ben Downing's Queen Bee of Tuscany brings an extraordinary Victorian back to life. Born into a distinguished intellectual family and raised among luminaries such as Dickens and Thackeray, Janet...
Dancing to the Precipice: Lucie de la Tour du Pin and the French Revolution
Born Lucie Dillon, to a half-French mother and an Anglo-Irish father, her world was Versailles and the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. She married a French aristocrat, and narrowly survived the French Revolution, escaping to America at the time of Washington and Jefferson. Here, she lived...
| Author | Mary S. Lovell |
| ISBN | 1857024699 |
The biography of Jane Digby, an ‘enthralling tale of a nineteenth-century beauty whose heart – and hormones – ruled her head.’ Harpers and Queen
A celebrated aristocratic beauty, Jane Digby married Lord Ellenborough at seventeen. Their divorce a few years later was one of England...
| Author | Michael Hill |
| ISBN | 1451665288 |
The remarkable and inspiring story--told largely in his own words--of American diplomat Elihu Washburne, who heroically aided his countrymen and other nationals when Paris was devastated by war and revolution in 1870-1871. A former Congressman and friend of Presidents Lincoln and Grant, Elihu...
Sasha and Emma: The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman
| Author | Paul Avrich |
| ISBN | 0674065980 |
In 1889 two Russian immigrants, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, met in a coffee shop on the Lower East Side. Over the next fifty years Emma and Sasha would be fast friends, fleeting lovers, and loyal comrades. This dual biography offers an unprecedented glimpse into their intertwined lives, the...
| Author | Jeffrey H. Jackson |
| ISBN | 0230617069 |
In the winter of 1910, the river that brought life to Paris—the Seine—became a force of destruction in just a matter of hours. Torrential rainfall saturated the soil, and faulty engineering created conditions that soon drowned Parisian streets, homes, businesses, and museums, thrusting the...
| Author | Anita Reynolds |
| ISBN | 0674073053 |
This is the rollicking, never-before-published memoir of a fascinating woman with an uncanny knack for being in the right place in the most interesting times. Of racially mixed heritage, Anita Reynolds was proudly African American but often passed for Indian, Mexican, or Creole. Actress, dancer,...
| Author | Ann Kirschner |
| ISBN | 0062199005 |
Lady at the O.K. Corral: The True Story of Josephine Marcus Earp by Ann Kirschner is the definitive biography of a Jewish girl from New York who won the heart of Wyatt Earp.
For nearly fifty years, she was the common-law wife of Wyatt Earp: hero of the O.K. Corral and the most famous lawman of the...
| Author | Andrea di Robilant |
| ISBN | 1400044138 |
From the acclaimed author of A Venetian Affair comes the vivid and dramatic story of the fall of Venice and the rise of a new age during the tumultuous Napoleonic period, as seen through the eyes of his great-great-great-great-grandmother.
In 1787, Lucia, the beautiful sixteen-year-old...
The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild
| Author | Hannah Mary Rothschild |
| ISBN | 0307961982 |
Beautiful, romantic and spirited, Pannonica, known as Nica, named after her father’s favorite moth, was born in 1913 to extraordinary, eccentric privilege and a storied history. The Rothschild family had, in only five generations, risen from the ghetto in Frankfurt to stately homes in England....
Chopin in Paris: The Life and Times of the Romantic Composer
| Author | Tad Szulc |
| ISBN | 0306809338 |
Chopin in Paris introduces the most important musical and literary figures of Fryderyk Chopin's day in a glittering story of the Romantic era. During Chopin's eighteen years in Paris, lasting nearly half his short life, he shone at the center of the immensely talented artists who were defining their...
Nancy: The Story of Lady Astor
A new biography of Nancy Astor, American socialite and social crusader who blazed a trail through British society amid two World Wars
In 1919, Nancy Astor became the first female Member of Parliament elected to the House of Commons—she was not what had been expected. Far from a virago who...
| Author | Sylvia Jukes Morris |
| ISBN | 0679457119 |
“I hope I shall have ambition until the day I die,” Clare Boothe Luce told her biographer Sylvia Jukes Morris. Price of Fame, the concluding volume of the life of an exceptionally brilliant polymath, chronicles Luce’s progress from the early months of World War II, when, as an eye-catching Congresswoman...
