Proust's Duchess

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST

“Rich with intimate details of [their] extraordinary lives…. Weber has done a remarkable job of bringing to life a world of culture, glamour and privilege.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Extraordinary…. Not only a serious work of scholarship but also a riveting triple biography of three rebellious women…the first ‘it’ girls, reinventing themselves as celebrities long before Instagram.” —Condé Nast Traveler

“Engrossing and intelligent…. Skillfully guides readers through the heyday of fin-de-siècle France, unveiling its beauty and elegance, its cleverness and charm, but also its contradictions and inequities, its cruelty and wretchedness…. Both a delicious guilty-pleasure read and a penetrating, clear-sighted piece of literary commentary.” —The Yale Review
 
“Beguiling…. Sumptuous…. Weber has succeeded much as [Proust] did in bringing that lost time back to glorious life.” —Elaine Showalter, The New York Times

“A brilliant study…. Social history at its richest. It is also very, very funny.” —Edmund White, TheTimes Literary Supplement, Best Books of the Year

“Exhaustive, engaging, brilliantly researched…. A book that throws considerable light on Proust’s method…. In this artificial world, with all its flickering shadows, Proust watched as through glass, while the duchesses and their guests paraded inside, under the illusion somehow that they were fully real.” —Colm Tóibín, The New York Review of Books
 
“Dazzlingly well researched and compulsively readable.” —Vogue