The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis

This riveting biography brilliantly explores the short, intense, and passionate life of the country girl from Normandy, who at thirteen fled her brute of a father to go to Paris. Almost overnight she became one of the most admired courtesans of the 1840s--the inspiration for Alexandre Dumas fils' The Lady of the Camellias and Verdi's La Traviata. With her aristocratic ways, elegant clothes and signature camellias, Marie was always a subject of fascination at the opera and the boulevard cafés. Her death at twenty-three from tuberculosis created such an outpouring of sympathy in the press that Charles Dickens, who was in Paris at the time, was amazed. "Everything is erased in the face of an incident which is far more important," he wrote, "the romantic death of one of the glories of the demi-monde, the beautiful, the famous Marie Duplessis."

Author: Julie Kavanagh
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 08/12/2014
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.65lbs
Size: 8.26h x 4.88w x 0.43d
ISBN: 9780804171557

Review Citation(s):
New York Times Book Review 10/26/2014 pg. 32

About the Author

Julie Kavanagh is the author of Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton and Nureyev. She was trained as a dancer at the Royal Ballet School, graduated from Oxford with a First in English, and has been the arts editor of Harpers & Queen, a dance critic at The Spectator, and London editor of both Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. She is currently a writer and contributing editor for The Economist's bi-monthly magazine, Intelligent Life.