Edith de Belleville is a native Parisian woman who was an attorney for many years. Her passion for Paris led her back to university to get her official tour guide license. Deeply inspired by great Parisian women of the past, Edith decided to write a book, in French, entitled The Beautiful Rebels of Paris (Belles et Rebelles Editions du 81). She just published her memoirs in English to share her literary & dreamy adventures in Paris, Parisian Life, adventures in the City of Light. When she's not at Versailles or the Louvre Museum to do her 'Beautiful Rebels of Paris Tour' Edith is sitting on a café terrace in Paris watching the world go by.
"One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," wrote Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 in her bestseller The Second Sex.
To sum up this famous quotation, it's not because you are a woman that you should enjoy cooking or doing the dishes.
We always link Simone de Beauvoir to Sartre but Simone decided who she wanted to be before meeting Jean-Paul. This is what the British author Kate Kirkpatrick tells us in this new biography.
Believe me, there are never enough biographies about Simone de Beauvoir, the iconic French feminist.
You think Simone de Beauvoir is old-fashioned? "Never forget that it will be enough for a political, economic, or religious crisis for the rights of women to be called into question. These rights are never acquired. You will have to remain vigilant throughout your life."
"One is not born a woman, but becomes one", Simone de Beauvoir
A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short.
Her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has been billed as one of the most legendary love affairs of the twentieth century. But for Beauvoir it came at a cost: for decades she was dismissed as an unoriginal thinker who…
They drink coffee for hours while they are talking. French people like to argue, to talk, and even to fight for their opinions. This phenomenon so French comes from Le salon.
Benedetta Craveri, Italian historian, explains how the art of conversation was invented by witty Parisian women as Madame de Rambouillet or Madeleine de Scudéry who were ruling literary salons in the 17th century. Those women taught men how to be gentlemen and not smelling garlic.
I'm a fan of Benedetta Craveri. She explains well how the past lightens the present. Everything Mrs. Craveri writes is smart, clear, and she is never pedantic.
In one word, she masters the French Art of conversation.
Now in paperback, an award-winning look at French salons and the women who presided over them
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between the reign of Louis XIII and the Revolution, French aristocratic society developed an art of living based on a refined code of good manners.
Conversation, which began as a way of passing time, eventually became the central ritual of social life. In the salons, freed from the rigidity of court life, it was women who dictated the rules and presided over exchanges among socialites, writers, theologians, and statesmen. They contributed decisively to the development of the modern…
The day the second atomic bomb was dropped, Clabe and Leora Wilson’s postman brought a telegram to their acreage near Perry, Iowa. One son was already in the U.S. Navy before Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Four more sons worked with their father, tenant farmers near Minburn until, one by…
When you read the incredible life of some people you don't really need to read fictional stories.
What a life Elisabeth Vigée - Le Brun had! It looks like a wonderful novel. She was a great French portrait painter (she painted 660 portraits!) during an age of revolution.
In 1778, at the age of 23, she painted her first portrait of Queen Marie Antoinette.
Elisabeth Vigée- Le Brun became one of the rare woman to be member of the prestigious French Royal Academy of paintings. After being exploited by an unfaithful husband she had to face the French Revolution.
She left France and traveled to Europe until the cold and far away Russia.
How much talent and energy did Elisabeth Vigée - Le Brun have to develop to be one of the best portraits painter of her time?
If you like art, the refined 18th century and audacious women, you won't be disappointed by Elisabeth's memoirs.
Elisabeth Louise Vige´e-Le Brun (1755-1842) was a French portrait painter during an age of revolution. In 1778, at the age of 23, she painted her first portrait of Queen Marie Antoinette. She left France in 1789 and travelled and painted through-out Europe. According to a detailed list she provided in her memoirs, she painted a total of 660 portraits, 15 paintings, and nearly 200 landscapes from both Switzerland and England. Her memoirs were published in Paris in 1869 by Charpentier et Cie. The first unabridged version of her memoirs in English, this book is a mine of information for readers…
You should meet her. She is a great woman. She is even the chapter four of my book written in French about 5 inspirational Parisian women.
Unfortunately my book is not translated in English yet. So in the meantime, don't miss this biography of George Sand, famous French writer from Romantic era who took a male nom de plume.
George Sand inspired Charlotte Brontë, she was lover and muse of Chopin and Alfred de Musset.
In the rigid 19th century she did not care to have younger lovers, to wear trousers, when it was illegal for women to wear trousers, and smoking cigars in public. How shocking!
The romantic and rebellious novelist George Sand, born in 1804 as Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, remains one of France's most infamous and beloved literary figures. Thanks to a peerless translation by Gretchen van Slyke, Martine Reid's acclaimed biography of Sand is now available in English.
Drawing on recent French and English biographies of Sand as well as her novels, plays, autobiographical texts, and correspondence, Reid creates the most complete portrait possible of a writer who was both celebrated and vilified. Reid contextualizes Sand within the literature of the nineteenth century, unfolds the meaning and importance of her chosen pen name,…
This memoir chronicles the lives of three generations of women with a passion for reading, writing, and travel. The story begins in 1992 in an unfinished attic in Brooklyn as the author reads a notebook written by her grandmother nearly 100 years earlier. This sets her on a 30-year search…
If I tell you I'm coming from Roaring Twenties and I have fascinating conversations with great characters who lived in Paris in 1920s, you will maybe think I'm a bit weird. And you will be right.
That's my Parisian life. In front of a café crème at La Rotonde café in Montparnasse, I fight with Picasso and I flirt with the young Hemingway.
And my best friend is called Kiki de Montparnasse. I know how to choose my best friend. Kiki was friendly with a strong temper and beautiful. She posed for painters and sculpters whose art now costs a fortune.
And of course Kiki was elected queen of Montparnasse, the place where modern art was created and the navel of the world, according Henry Miller. And like Miller, Kiki's book was censured in USA because it was too spicy.
She even has an introduction written by Ernest Hemingway—a rare honor. This charming French graphic biography brings Paris Roaring Twenties alive with the kinky Kiki as a guide.
In the bohemian and brilliant Montparnasse of the 1920s, Kiki managed to escape poverty to become one of the most charismatic figures of the avant-garde years between the wars. Partner to Man Ray - whose most legendary photos she inspired - she would be immortalised by Kisling, Foujita, Per Krohg, Calder, Utrillo and Leger. Kiki was the muse of a generation that seeks to escape the hangover of the Great War, but she was above all one of the first emancipated women of the 20th century.
When your best girl friend is Coco Chanel, your life can't be too dull. When your enemy is Napoléon, your life can't be too ordinary either. And when you are flirting with Hemingway at the Ritz bar in Paris, even your love life is glamorous. This is the fabulous and real life in the City of Light of Edith de Belleville, a native Parisian who is in love with the past, art, and extravagance.
Edith's frank and charming style brings Paris vividly to life—its charm, its idiosyncrasies, its cafés, and its glorious ghosts from the past. This collection of short stories is for anyone who loves Paris—the history, the romance, the culture—and who dreams of Parisian life.
A spy school for girls amidst Jane Austen’s high society.
Daughters of the Beau Monde who don’t fit London society’s strict mold are banished to Stranje House, where the headmistress trains these unusually gifted girls to enter the dangerous world of spies in the Napoleonic wars. #1 NYT bestselling author…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
