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msw's review
5.0
Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women's Memory by Marilyn Yalom
This is a book I learned about while reviewing Hilton Obenzinger's book Why We Write (Issue # 183). Yalom was one of his interviewees, and her study of women's views of the French Revolution is build around old memoirs and letters. She has passages from Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun's memoir, which I also reviewed last issue (Vigée-Lebrun right). Yalom's book includes a majority of aristocratic writers or admirers of the aristocracy, but also Madame Roland, a Republican who wrote a lot of her husband's material and died on the guillotine during the Terror.
Among the aristocrats, Madame Tour de la Pin has a particularly striking story. She was young and energetic and fled with her husband to various European countries and America during the revolution. They farmed and made a popular hard cider. So she was aristocratic but not afraid of work. There is also a conservative peasant French Revolution womenwoman who was a soldier of the Vendée. No one fits neatly in a box. My only caveat, and it is one that Yalom is very aware of herself, is that there is very little to represent the truly poor (and most likely illiterate) women who supported the Revolution.
So one has to make do with the endlessly entertaining Liberal and enemy of NapoleonGermaine de Stael, Madame de Staël (right). Unlike most of the writers here, she was a theorist even more than a recorder of her own experience, although she gets that into her writings too. She was one of the richest women in Europe and always worth reading for her sharp observations and her quasi-feminism-- or at least De Staëlism.
Yalom has great notes and a bibliography, of course, and is also good on the position of women in the eighteenth century, all classes. The work began as a scholarly piece, but is very readable, with excellent images and choice quotations from the various memoirs and letters and journals.
This is a book I learned about while reviewing Hilton Obenzinger's book Why We Write (Issue # 183). Yalom was one of his interviewees, and her study of women's views of the French Revolution is build around old memoirs and letters. She has passages from Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun's memoir, which I also reviewed last issue (Vigée-Lebrun right). Yalom's book includes a majority of aristocratic writers or admirers of the aristocracy, but also Madame Roland, a Republican who wrote a lot of her husband's material and died on the guillotine during the Terror.
Among the aristocrats, Madame Tour de la Pin has a particularly striking story. She was young and energetic and fled with her husband to various European countries and America during the revolution. They farmed and made a popular hard cider. So she was aristocratic but not afraid of work. There is also a conservative peasant French Revolution womenwoman who was a soldier of the Vendée. No one fits neatly in a box. My only caveat, and it is one that Yalom is very aware of herself, is that there is very little to represent the truly poor (and most likely illiterate) women who supported the Revolution.
So one has to make do with the endlessly entertaining Liberal and enemy of NapoleonGermaine de Stael, Madame de Staël (right). Unlike most of the writers here, she was a theorist even more than a recorder of her own experience, although she gets that into her writings too. She was one of the richest women in Europe and always worth reading for her sharp observations and her quasi-feminism-- or at least De Staëlism.
Yalom has great notes and a bibliography, of course, and is also good on the position of women in the eighteenth century, all classes. The work began as a scholarly piece, but is very readable, with excellent images and choice quotations from the various memoirs and letters and journals.
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