Forced to marry an elderly baron instead of a man she loves, impoverished noblewoman Gabrielle de Montserrat is condemned to death at the height of the French Revolution and finds her life placed in the hands of her former lover.
“A thrilling story of seduction, betrayal, and loss, Freud’s Mistress will titillate fans of Memoirs of a Geisha and The Other Boleyn Girl.”—Booklist In fin-de-siècle Vienna, it was not easy for a woman to find fulfillment both intellectually and sexually. But many believe that Minna Bernays was able to find both with one man—her brother-in-law, Sigmund Freud. At once a portrait of two sisters—the rebellious, independent Minna and her inhibited sister, Martha—and of the compelling and controversial doctor who would be revered as one of the twentieth century’s greatest thinkers, Freud’s Mistress is a novel rich with passion and historical detail and “a portrait of forbidden desire [with] a thought-provoking central question: How far are you willing to go to be happy?”* *Publishers Weekly
At the end of the American Revolution, Elizabeth Freeman was an enslaved widow and mother living in Massachusetts. Hearing the words of the new Massachusetts state constitution which declared liberty and equality for all, she sought the help of a young lawyer named Theodore Sedgwick, later Speaker of the House and one of America's leading Federalist politicians. The lawsuit that she and Sedgwick pursued would bring freedom to her and her daughter, as well as thousands of other enslaved people. After leaving her enslaver's family to work for the family of Theodore Sedgwick, she effectively became the foster mother to his seven children when his wife Pamela became a chronic invalid, enabling Sedgwick to pursue his political career. Two of his sons would credit her with saving their lives. His daughter Catharine Maria Sedgwick, one of the most famous female novelists of the early decades of the nineteenth century, would make her the model for one of her most celebrated heroines. This biography details Elizabeth Freeman's life and the far-reaching influence of her battle for freedom.
An RT Book Reviews Top Pick and 2017 RT Reviewers' Choice Best Book Nominee: THE WARDROBE MISTRESS is Meghan Masterson's fascinating and visceral debut, an inside look at Marie Antoinette's luxurious life in Versailles remarkably juxtaposed against life in third estate as the French Revolution gains strength. A propulsive exploration of love, loyalty, danger, and intrigue...not to be missed. It's Giselle Aubry's first time at court in Versailles. At sixteen, she is one of Marie Antoinette's newest undertirewomen, and in awe of the glamorous queen and her opulent palace life. A budding designer, it's a dream come true to work with the beautiful fabrics and jewels in the queen's wardrobe. But every few weeks she returns home to visit her family in Paris where rumors of revolution are growing stronger. From her position working in the royal household, Giselle is poised to see both sides of the revolutionary tensions erupting throughout Paris. When her uncle, a retired member of the secret du roi, a spy ring that worked for the old King, Louis XV, suggests that she casually report the Queen’s actions back to him as a game, she leaps at the chance. Spying seems like an adventure and an exciting way to privately support the revolution taking the countryside by storm. She also enjoys using her insight from Versailles in lively debates with Léon Gauvain, the handsome and idealistic revolutionary who courts her. But as the uprising continues to gain momentum, and Giselle grows closer to the Queen, becoming one of the few trusted servants, she finds herself dangerously torn. Violence is escalating; she must choose where her loyalty truly lies, or risk losing everything...maybe even her head.
Revolutionary feminism grew out of the cultural revolution that founded the modern state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. That cultural revolution responded to the revolution in France, and at the center of both revolutions was the question of the rights and duties of women. Mary Wollstonecraft's mind and career were shaped in response to these revolutions, leading her to formulate a feminism for her time--revolutionary feminism. This book describes the growth of Wollstonecraft's mind and career, and examines all her writings as experiments in revolutionizing writing in terms of her revolutionary feminism.
Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award Finalist for the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction Finalist for the Marfield Prize For fans of Book of Ages and American Eve, this “lively, illuminating new biography” (The Boston Globe) of 19th-century queer actress Charlotte Cushman portrays a “brisk, beautifully crafted life” (Stacy Schiff, bestselling author of The Witches and Cleopatra) that riveted New York City and made headlines across America. All her life, Charlotte Cushman refused to submit to others’ expectations. Raised in Boston at the time of the transcendentalists, a series of disasters cleared the way for her life on the stage—a path she eagerly took, rejecting marriage and creating a life of adventure, playing the role of the hero in and out of the theater as she traveled to New Orleans and New York City, and eventually to London and back to build a successful career. Her Hamlet, Romeo, Lady Macbeth, and Nancy Sykes from Oliver Twist became canon, impressing Louisa May Alcott, who later based a character on her in Jo’s Boys, and Walt Whitman, who raved about “the towering grandeur of her genius” in his columns for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. She acted alongside Edwin and John Wilkes Booth—supposedly giving the latter a scar on his neck that was later used to identify him as President Lincoln’s assassin—and visited frequently with the Great Emancipator himself, who was a devoted Shakespeare fan and admirer of Cushman’s work. Her wife immortalized her in the angel at the top of Central Park’s Bethesda Fountain; worldwide, she was “a lady universally acknowledged as the greatest living tragic actress.” Behind the scenes, she was equally radical, making an independent income, supporting her family, creating one of the first bohemian artists’ colonies abroad, and living publicly as a queer woman. And yet, her name has since faded into the shadows. Now, her story comes to brilliant life with Tana Wojczuk’s Lady Romeo, an exhilarating and enlightening biography of the 19th-century trailblazer. With new research and rarely seen letters and documents, Wojczuk reconstructs the formative years of Cushman’s life, set against the excitement and drama of 1800s New York City and featuring a cast of luminaries and revolutionaries who changed the cultural landscape of America forever. The story of an astonishing and uniquely American life, Lady Romeo reveals one of the most remarkable forgotten figures in our history and restores her to center stage, where she belongs.
Professor Freeborn's book is an attempt to identify and define the evolution of a particular kind of novel in Russian and Soviet literature: the revolutionary novel. This genre is a uniquely Russian phenomenon and one that is of central importance in Russian literature. The study begins with a consideration of Turgenev's masterpiece Fathers and Children and traces the evolution of the revolutionary novel through to its most important development a century later in Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and the emergence of a dissident literature in the Soviet Union. Professor Freeborn examines the particular phases of the genre's development, and in particular the development after 1917: the early fiction which explored the relationship between revolution and instinct, such as Pil'nyak's The Naked Year; the first attempts at mythmaking in Leonov's The Badgers and Furmanov's Chapayev; the next phase, in which novelists turned to the investigation of ideas, exemplified most notably by Zamyatin's We; the resumption of the classical approach in such works as Olesha's Envy, which explore the interaction between the individual and society. and finally the appearance of the revolutionary epic in Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin, Sholokhov's Quiet Flows the Don, and Alexey Tolstoy's The Road to Calvary. Professor Freeborn also examines the way this kind of novel has undergone change in response to revolutionary change; and he shows how an important feature of this process has been the implicit assumption that the revolutionary novel is distinguished by its right to pass an objective, independent judgement on revolution and the revolutionary image of man. This is a comprehensive and challenging study of a uniquely Russian tradition of writing, which draws on a great range of novels, many of them little-known in the West. As with other titles in this series all quotations have been translated.
The figure of the mistress is undoubtedly controversial. She provokes intense reactions, ranging from fear, to disgust and revulsion, to excitement and titillation, to sadness and perhaps to some, love. The mistress is conventionally depicted as a threat to moral living and someone whose sexuality is considered defective and toxic. Of course, she is a woman that you would not have as your friend, and certainly not your wife, since her ethical sense, if she even has one, is dubious at best. This book subverts these traditional judgements and offers an unflinching look at the lived experience of the mistress. Here she is recast as a potentially loving, free, intimate 'other' woman. Drawing upon feminist philosophy, contemporary sexual ethics and the current cultural moment of #MeToo, Mistress Ethics moves beyond a narrative of infidelity, conventional judgment, the safeguarding of monogamy and conventional heterosex that permeates our society. It asks what happens when we let go of our insecurities, judgments and moralistic relationship philosophies and opt, instead, for an ethics of kindness. This kindness – underpinned by engaging with those deemed 'other' and learning from mistresses, both straight and queer – will teach us new ways of thinking about ethics and sex, and reveal how we have better sex, and how we can be better to each other.
This book explores shifting representations and receptions of the arms-bearing woman on the British stage during a period in which she comes to stand in Britain as a striking symbol of revolutionary chaos. The book makes a case for viewing the British Romantic theatre as an arena in which the significance of the armed woman is constantly remodelled and reappropriated to fulfil diverse ideological functions. Used to challenge as well as to enforce established notions of sex and gender difference, she is fashioned also as an allegorical tool, serving both to condemn and to champion political and social rebellion at home and abroad. Magnifying heroines who appear on stage wielding pistols, brandishing daggers, thrusting swords, and even firing explosives, the study spotlights the intricate and often surprising ways in which the stage amazon interacts with Anglo-French, Anglo-Irish, Anglo-German, and Anglo-Spanish debates at varying moments across the French revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. At the same time, it foregrounds the extent to which new dramatic genres imported from Europe –notably, the German Sturm und Drang and the French-derived melodrama– facilitate possibilities at the turn of the nineteenth century for a refashioned female warrior, whose degree of agency, destructiveness, and heroism surpasses that of her tragic and sentimental predecessors.