Francine du Plessix Gray "Rage and Fire: A Life of Louise Colet: Pioneer Feminist, Literary Star, Flaubert's Muse." Illustrated.

A portrait of the life of a nineteenth-century feminist and literary figure traces the fortunes of the beautiful Louise Colet, the model for Madame Bovary, through her career as salon hostess, novelist, and political journalist. Thanks largely to the excoriation by her lover Gustave Flaubert and his coterie of literary misogynists, the life and work of the poet Colet (1810-76) have fallen into obscurity. Feminist journalist, novelist, poet and flamboyant populist, the impetuous, exuberant Louise Colet (1810-1876) is best known as Gustave Flaubert's great love and a midwife of Madame Bovary.

In this gossipy, captivating biography, noted journalist and novelist Gray ( Lovers and Tyrants ) limns Colet as "a 19th-century Erica Jong who recklessly splashed her life and loves across her poetry and prose." Confidante of Victor Hugo, lover of debauched poet Alfred de Musset, Colet sparred politically with George Sand and ran a salon frequented by Baudelaire and Alexandre Dumas. She was an ardent supporter of the Paris Commune of 1871 and a fierce critic of the Catholic Church, which she accused of bigotry and hypocrisy. Yet in her later years Colet became what Gray calls "a militant born-again moralist" who railed at the materialism and loose morals of the Second Empire.

Gray delineates the many facets of a hot-tempered, ambitious extrovert, a self-supporting single mother who refused to compromise her independence by living with a man.

Steeped in the Romantic movement, Colet strove to be taken seriously as a poet yet "compromised" herself by her relentless self-promotion and by taking famous men to bed.

Hardcover. 1994.

New book. A couple of tiny taped tears on DJ. A couple of tiny light spots on for-edge. Book in good visual and very good technical condition.