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

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.”“We are in Kavanagh’s debt for shining a light on this woman almost forgotten in the dust of history, allowing her legend to endure. . . . The Lady Who Loved Camellias has it all. Ms. Kavanagh is a well-established biographer and achieved international fame with her previous, definitive biography on the great dancer, Nureyev. This new book cements her well-deserved reputation.”
—New York Journal of Books
 
“Colorful. . . . Julie Kavanagh exposes the tawdry reality behind her heroine’s legend.”
—The New York Times
 
“Julie Kavanagh ships us into 19th-century Paris and into the boudoir of Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis.”
—Vanity Fair
 
“An absorbl£ƒ