Elizabeth Kerri Mahon

Title:   Black Venus Author:   James MacManus Publisher:   Thomas Dunne Books Pub Date:   May 7, 2013 How Acquired:   From the publicist What it’s About:   A vivid novel of Charles Baudelaire and his lover Jeanne Duval, the Haitian cabaret singer who inspired his most famous and controversial poems, set in nineteenth-century Paris. For readers who have been drawn to The Paris Wife, Black Venus captures the artistic scene in the great French city decades earlier, when the likes of Dumas and Balzac argued literature in the cafes of the Left Bank. Among the bohemians, the young Charles Baudelaire stood out—dressed impeccably thanks to an inheritance that was quickly vanishing. Still at work on the poems that he hoped would make his name, he spent his nights enjoying the alcohol, opium, and women who filled the seedy streets of the city.   One woman would catch his eye—a beautiful Haitian cabaret singer named Jeanne Duval. Their...

In her lifetime, it was said there were three great powers in Europe: Britain, Russia and Madame de Staël.   She was a political and literary intellectual giant in an age when women weren't expected to be either.   She was also crucial in putting together the coalition that brought down Napoleon, most of the important treaty negotiations between Russia and Sweden against Napoleon were conducted through Madame de Staël.   After Napoleon's fall, her salon in Paris was where the attempts at constitutional monarchy were framed. She was also an accomplished writer of novels ( Delphine, Corrine or Italy ), travel writing (her three volume work ‘On Germany’ was heralded at the time), pamphleteer (she wrote a spirited defense of Marie Antoinette) and literary critic ( On Literature ) who pretty much invented comparative literature. During the reign of terror, Germaine used her status as a Swiss citizen to save the lives of at least a dozen people.   Unlike her contem...