Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet : Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert's Muse - Hardcover

To ``reinstate a colleague'' and ``resurrect another woman,'' Gray, novelist (October Blood, 1985) and journalist (Soviet Women, 1990), has composed a life and sexual history of Colet (1810-76), poet, political and fashion journalist, dramatist, and muse to Flaubert, by whom, after their tempestuous affair, she was immortalized as Madame Bovary. Born in the provinces, motivated by fictional romances, Colet ran off to Paris with an impoverished musician (to this day, her descendants, who have turned the family home into a golf resort, continue to disown her). In the heady world of salons, artists, and writers such as Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Alfred de Musset, the newcomer flourished as poet and dramatist. She had considerable renown when she met the unknown Flaubert, 11 years her junior, repressed, sexually conflicted, and syphilitic, who seduced her in hansom cabs, made fetishes of her slippers and hair, obsessed over her letters and then, in one dramatic moment, burned them all. The affair was brief, followed by a seven-year friendship, and here it's Flaubert's life, travels, opinions, and explicitly sexual letters (indeed, everyone's explicitly sexual letters) that take up most of the biography. There are informative side-essays on Parisian women, 19th-century women writers, and men's sexual relations--as well as interesting digressions on venereal disease and on sodomy in Egypt, where Flaubert traveled--making up a cultural history of sexual practices. Sadly, except for tantalizing allusions to Charlotte Corday and The Last Cleric--a scandalous attack on the Catholic Church--and some translations of her poetry, Colet's reputation as a ``literary star'' and feminist is obscured by her sexual history. A vivid and absorbing account--but Colet is as unsympathetic as Madame Bovary, remaining an unknown, misguided figure of unfulfilled passions and talents, a heroine in a naughty novel, famous for the scenes she made and the men she loved. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Louise Colet was a prolific writer and statuesque Frenchwoman with cascading blond hair, disconcerting blue eyes, a penchant for azure dresses, a fine mind, and a healthy sexual appetite. Colet was intent on escaping her stifling Provence home and giving her literary talent free range in Paris. Marriage was the only safe passage for a lady, so marriage it was, albeit an unsuccessful one. Once Colet reached Paris and made her writing debut, she took a lover with considerable clout in literary circles and began hosting a weekly salon. Colet had to use all her wiles to compete in the hypocritical and rather sordid high culture of mid-nineteenth-century Paris, where affairs such as hers were de rigueur. Du Plessix Gray superbly re-creates Colet's milieu and deftly portrays her lovers and colleagues, particularly her most famous conquest, the innovative novelist Flaubert. Colet endured Flaubert's selfishness and was, indeed, his muse and "midwife" to his most celebrated creation, Emma Bovary. Du Plessix Gray subjects their tempestuous relationship to close scrutiny, contrasting their temperaments and marveling at Colet's survival skills, generosity of spirit, and unflagging energy. On the other hand, she dubs her a "nineteenth-century Erica Jong who recklessly splashed her life and loves across her poetry and prose," but Colet is a paragon compared to the ruthless and sexually "cryptic and convoluted" Flaubert. Du Plessix Gray is absolutely dazzling here, by turns passionate and venomous, scholarly and outraged, ironic and empathic. Donna Seaman