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Proust's Duchess

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

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

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

By Caroline Weber

By Caroline Weber

By Caroline Weber

By Caroline Weber

By Caroline Weber
Read by Suzanne Toren

By Caroline Weber
Read by Suzanne Toren

Best Seller
Paperback $20.00

Nov 26, 2019 | ISBN 9780345803122

Ebook $14.99

May 22, 2018 | ISBN 9780307961792

Audiobook Download $30.00

May 22, 2018 | 1793 Minutes

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    Proust's Duchess by Caroline Weber
    Paperback $20.00
    Nov 26, 2019 | ISBN 9780345803122

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      Nov 26, 2019 | ISBN 9780345803122

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      May 22, 2018 | ISBN 9780307961792

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    About Proust’s Duchess

    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.

    About Proust’s Duchess

    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.

    About Proust’s Duchess

    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.

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    About Caroline Weber

    CAROLINE WEBER is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University; she has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. She is the author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (2006) She… More about Caroline Weber

    About Caroline Weber

    CAROLINE WEBER is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University; she has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. She is the author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (2006) She… More about Caroline Weber

    About Caroline Weber

    CAROLINE WEBER is a professor of French and Comparative Literature at Barnard College, Columbia University; she has also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton. She is the author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie-Antoinette Wore to the Revolution (2006) She… More about Caroline Weber

    Product Details

    Category: European World History | Literary Criticism | Biography & Memoir

    Paperback | $20.00
    Published by Vintage
    Nov 26, 2019 | 752 Pages | 6-1/8 x 9-1/4 | ISBN 9780345803122

    Category: European World History | Literary Criticism | Biography & Memoir

    Ebook | $14.99
    Published by Vintage
    May 22, 2018 | 736 Pages | ISBN 9780307961792

    Category: European World History | Literary Criticism | Biography & Memoir | Audiobooks

    Audiobook Download | $30.00
    Published by Random House Audio
    May 22, 2018 | 1793 Minutes | ISBN 9780525588924
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    Praise

    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

    Awards

    Pulitzer Prize (Biography) FINALIST 2019

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