The Girl Who Loved Camellias

April 8, 2013
Thanks to a talented author, this tragedy is a pleasure to read. Already praised as a biographer, Kavanagh (Secret Muses: The Life of Frederick Ashton) intertwines the adventures of a famous courtesan with a fascinating period in Parisian history, with each scene spotlighting yet another titillating aspect of 1840s bohemia. Marie Duplessis was an unlikely demimondaine: she began life as an exploited peasant girl, but cultivated her looks and native intellect to gain entrée into cafes, salons, balls, and many high-born hearts—including those of Franz Liszt and Alexandre Dumas—and she played the muse for novels, plays, ballets, poetry, and the enduringly popular opera La Traviata. Charles Dickens called her “one of the glories of the demimonde” and reported that the estate sale following her death from tuberculosis at the age of 23 drew “everyone whom the capital of France counts as illustrious.” Yet a courtesan of her rank had a paradoxical status: socialites admired her from afar, but kept their distance in public. The result was a mixture of respect and disdain within a milieu of literati, cognoscenti, and royalty. Kavanagh’s book is a thoroughly researched and fascinating account of Duplessis’s short life and lengthy legacy. 16 pages of color photos.

May 1, 2013
Intelligent Life contributing editor Kavanagh (Nureyev: The Life, 2007, etc.) attempts to sort out the biography of the short-lived Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis (1824-1847). We know her as Violetta in La Traviata, but she was Marguerite in Alexander Dumas' The Lady of the Camellias and Alphonsine when she was born in 1824 Normandy. In the ways of the 19th-century French, when a girl became a courtesan, she was to have an apartment, jewels, equipage, a very generous allowance and often tutoring in the finer ways of society. For Duplessis, however, "this was far more than Pygmalion or Pretty Woman transformation," writes Kavanagh. "The country waif, scarcely able to read or write when she arrived in the capital at the age of thirteen, was presiding over her own salon seven years later, regularly receiving aristocrats, politicians, artists, and many of the celebrated writers of her day." Lacking Duplessis' correspondence, the author depends on the accounts of contemporary authors and one of her subject's childhood friends, as well as the book and play by Dumas. Determining her age in the period when her father apprenticed her to a laundry, gave her to the gypsies, "sold" her to a debauching septuagenarian and "lost" her in Paris proves daunting. Too often, the author refers to Duplessis as Marguerite or Alphonsine and to her lovers by their pseudonyms; the time and places change without warning. Duplessis was quick to adapt to the culture of love in Paris with frequent changes of lovers--so many, in fact, that it's difficult to keep track. The fact that many of her men overlapped adds to the confusion, as do the many references to men identified only by initials or pseudonyms. Duplessis' string of lovers was sufficiently fascinating to become the basis of books, plays and Verdi's opera. As a chronicle of French life, Kavanagh's book is great fun; as biography, it's scattered.

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Starred review from June 1, 2013
Kavanagh became intrigued with Marie Duplessis, a svelte, cultured young courtesan in Paris in the 1840s, while she was researching her biographies of Ashton and Nureyev. Duplessis inspired The Lady of the Camellias by Alexandre Dumas fils (now out in a sparkling new translation by critic Liesl Schillinger), and Verdi's opera, La Traviata, and the more Kavanagh learned about Duplessis, one of the great romantic muses, the more deeply she fell under her spell. Equipped with the treasures gleaned from persistent research and guided by empathy, Kavanagh tells the full, whirling story of how a poor, sexually abused peasant girl from Normandy turned herself into a cosmopolitan, free-spirited woman of intellect and desire supported in style by high-society lovers. As clever and observant as she was lithe and lovely, Duplessis not only spent her well-earned cash on the usual luxuries but also immersed herself in literature and the arts while igniting rivalries among her protectors as she indulged her sybaritic nature. Kavanagh is a warm, nimble portraitist, wryly chronicling the glittering if doomed realm of the courtesan while following Duplessis as she attains the heights of adoration only to fall to tuberculosis, dying at age 23. Now Duplessis is a muse once again, this time for an adept biographer who elegantly preserves her indelible true story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2013

Award-winning biographer Kavanagh peels back the petals to give us a portrait of the woman who inspired Alexandre Dumas fils's The Lady of the Camellias and Verdi's La Traviata.

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2013

Kavanagh (contributing editor, Economist; Nureyev: The Life) introduces to a new generation of readers Marie Duplessis (1824-47), a gritty and gutsy young woman who overcame abandonment by her mother and sexual exploitation by her father to captivate 1840s Paris before dying tragically at the age of 23. Dubbed "the lady of the camellias" because of her ostentatious attachment to that hothouse status symbol, the peasant girl-turned- courtesan was the romantic muse for a host of artists--Alexandre Dumas fils, Franz Liszt, Giuseppe Verdi, and others. The beautiful and witty coquette's life became the basis for Dumas's novel La Dame aux Camelias, which became a play (with Sarah Bernhardt in 1852) and an opera, Verdi's La Traviata, in 1853, with several later portraits of Camille on film, most notably Greta Garbo's in 1936. While Kavanagh strives to separate Duplessis from the mythology around her, she has some difficulty doing so owing to a paucity of historical sources. The result is a narrative that's difficult to follow at times, especially for readers unfamiliar with the literary and musical renditions. VERDICT Nonetheless, this story of a woman who "made her own luck" could appeal to general readers as well as to those interested in 19th-century French culture. [See Prepub Alert, 12/7/12.]--Marie M. Mullaney, Caldwell Coll., NJ

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.