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Proust's Duchess

Name: Proust's Duchess
Brand: Vintage
SKU: 9780345803122-PRUSDTR-US
Price: 134.0 HKD
Availability: InStock

How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris

Caroline Weber (Author) ... more

Edition: US - Paperback / softback

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English • Age Adult - Adult

752 pages • 6.11 x 9.18 x 1.51 in

Approx. weight: 2.03 lb

Publication date: 26 Nov,2019

Barcode: 9780345803122 • Vintage

More books in English for Age Adult - Adult

European history
Literature: history and criticism
Biography: general
Gender studies: women and girls

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By: Caroline Weber

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • A brilliant look at turn-of-the-century Paris through the first in-depth study of the three women Proust used to create his supreme fictional character, the Duchesse de Guermantes. “Weber has done a remarkable job of bringing to life…a world of culture, glamour and privilege.” —The Wall Street Journal

Geneviève Halévy Bizet Straus; Laure de Sade, Comtesse de Adhéaume de Chevigné; and Élisabeth de Riquet de Caraman-Chimay, the Comtesse Greffulhe--these were the three superstars of fin-de-siècle Parisian high society who, as Caroline Weber says, "transformed themselves, and were transformed by those around them, into living legends: paragons of elegance, nobility, and style." All well but unhappily married, these women sought freedom and fulfillment by reinventing themselves, between the 1870s and 1890s, as icons. At their fabled salons, they inspired the creativity of several generations of writers, visual artists, composers, designers, and journalists. Against a rich historical backdrop, Weber takes the reader into these women's daily lives of masked balls, hunts, dinners, court visits, nights at the opera or theater. But we see as well the loneliness, rigid social rules, and loveless, arranged marriages that constricted these women's lives. Proust, as a twenty-year-old law student in 1892, would worship them from afar, and later meet them and create his celebrated composite character for The Remembrance of Things Past.