Francine du Plessix Gray Books In Order

Novels

  1. Lovers And Tyrants (1976)
  2. World Without End (1981)
  3. October Blood (1985)
  4. The Queen’s Lover (2012)

Non fiction

  1. Divine Disobedience (1971)
  2. Hawaii (1972)
  3. Adam and Eve and the City (1987)
  4. Soviet Women (1990)
  5. Rage And Fire (1994)
  6. At Home with the Marquis De Sade (1998)
  7. Simone Weil (2001)
  8. Them (2005)
  9. Madame De Stael (2008)

Novels Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Francine du Plessix Gray Books Overview

Lovers And Tyrants

First published to rave reviews in 1967, this compelling novel follows Stephanie from her childhood in France, through her father’s mysterious disappearance, her emigration to America, her adolescence in New York, her marriage, her children, and ultimately her self liberation, with each phase illustrating the painful ambivalence toward the irreconcilable poles of love and freedom.

Soviet Women

In this book, the author brings us the voices of women doctors, dissidents, party workers, journalists and factory workers, who talk about their lives. It emerges that women continue to suffer a variety of injustices, and there is backwardness in sex education and women’s health facilities.

Rage And Fire

Acclaimed novelist and essayist Francine du Plessix Gray paints a spirited portrait of a woman who defied the rules and expectations of a misogynistic society to become one of its preeminent writers, as well as the intimate of such great literary figures as Flaubert, Hugo, and Musset. Most English language readers are familiar with the notoriously tempestuous and beautiful Louise Colet as Gustave Flaubert’s only love and his model for Emma Bovary. But in addition, she was, at the summit of her career, one of the most famous female literary figures in France. In describing Colet’s ascent to literary fame, Gray draws on Louise Colet’s recently discovered journals to capture the spirit of this fiercely independent woman. She also illuminates in vivid detail the intellectual, social, and sexual mores of nineteenth century France. Written in a richly textured, novelistic style, Rage And Fire brilliantly captures the complexities of a woman who ascended to fame and literary respectability through her talent and a willful spirit that refused to acknowledge the word no.

At Home with the Marquis De Sade

A remarkable and unparalleled portrait of the Marquis de Sade and the two women who endured his peculiar geniusMuch has been written about the Marquis de Sade 1740 1814, the flamboyant aristocrat whose years indulging in sexual aberrations inspired his celebrated works 120 Days of Sodom and Justine and landed him in the Bastille. However, scant attention has been paid to the two women who were closest to him: Renee Pelagie de Sade, his adoring wife, and his powerful mother in law, Madame de Montreuil. Francine du Plessix Gray draws on thousands of pages of letters exchanged by the married couple, few of which have been published before in English, to explore in the fullest historical and psychological detail what it was like to be married to one of the most maverick spirits of modern history. Gray brings to life two remarkable women and their complex relationship to Sade as they dedicated themselves to protecting him from the law, curbing his excesses, and ultimately confining him. With immediacy, irony, and verve, At Home with the Marquis De Sade also conjures up the extravagant hedonism and terror of late eighteenth century France.’At Home with the Marquis De Sade is not the first full length life of Sade in English, but it is most likely to remain the best.’ Chicago Tribune’Boldly imaginative…
. The long suffering spouse of history’s most infamous rake becomes a praiseworthy enabler of greatness.’ The New York Times Book Review A New York Times Notable Book A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998 and a finalist for the Salon Book of the Year A Book of the Month Club and a Quality Paperback Book Club Selection

Simone Weil

Francine du Plessix Gray’s biography of the Marquis de Sade, At Home with the Marquis de Sade, was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as a ‘boldly imaginative retelling’ of his life and garnered the critically acclaimed author a Pulitzer Prize nomination. In Simone Weil, du Plessix Gray vividly evokes the life of an equally complex and intriguing figure. A patriot and a mystic, an unruly activist plagued by self doubt, a pampered intellectual with a credo of manual labor, an ascetic who craved sensuous beauty, Simone Weil died at the age of thirty four prematurely after a long struggle with anorexia. But her tremendous intellectual legacy foresaw many of the twentieth century’s great changes and continues to influence philosophy today. Simone Weil traces this seminal thinker’s transformation from privileged Parisian student to union organizer, activist, and philosopher as well as the complex evolution of her ideas on Christianity, politics, and sexuality. In this thoughtful and compelling biography, du Plessix Gray illuminates an enigmatic figure and early feminist whose passion and pathos will fascinate a wide audience of readers.

Them

The much acclaimed biographer’s unflinchingly honest, wise, and forgiving portrait of her own famous parents: two wildly talented Russian migr’s who fled wartime Paris to become one of New York’s first and grandest power couples. Tatiana du Plessix, the wife of a French diplomat, was a beautiful, sophisticated ‘white Russian’ who had been the muse of the famous Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Alexander Liberman, the ambitious son of a prominent Russian Jew, was a gifted magazine editor and aspiring artist. As part of the progressive artistic Russian migr community living in Paris in the 1930s, the two were destined to meet. They began a passionate affair, and the year after Paris was occupied in World War II they fled to New York with Tatiana’s young daughter, Francine. There they determinedly rose to the top of high society, holding court to a Who’s Who list of the midcentury’s intellectuals and entertainers. Flamboyant and outrageous, bold and brilliant, they were irresistible to friends like Marlene Dietrich, Salvador Dal , and the publishing tycoon Cond Nast. But to those who knew them well they were also highly neurotic, narcissistic, and glacially self promoting, prone to cut out of their lives, with surgical precision, close friends who were no longer of use to them. Tatiana became an icon of New York fashion, and the hats she designed for Saks Fifth Avenue were de rigueur for stylish women everywhere. Alexander Liberman, who devotedly raised Francine as his own child from the time she was nine, eventually came to preside over the entire Cond Nast empire. The glamorous life they shared was both creative and destructive and was marked by an exceptional bond forged out of their highly charged love and raging self centeredness. Their obsessive adulation of success and elegance was elevated to a kind of worship, and the high drama that characterized their lives followed them to their deaths. Tatiana, increasingly consumed with nostalgia for a long lost Russia, spent her last years addicted to painkillers. Shortly after her death, Alexander, then age eighty, shocked all who knew him by marrying her nurse. Them: A Portrait of Parents is a beautifully written homage to the extraordinary lives of two fascinating, irrepressible people who were larger than life emblems of a bygone age. Written with honesty and grace by the person who knew them best, this generational saga is a survivor’s story. Tatiana and Alexander survived the Russian Revolution, the fall of France, and New York’s factory of fame. Their daughter, Francine, survived them.

Madame De Stael

‘A writer of scintillating style and resonant substance,’ Publishers Weekly, bestselling author Francine du Plessix Gray chronicles the incandescent life of the most celebrated woman of letters of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era.

The daughter of the second most important man in France, Louis XVI’s Minister of Finances, Jacques Necker, Madame de Sta l was born into a world of political and intellectual prominence. Later, she married Sweden’s ambassador to the French court, and for a span of twenty years, she held the limelight as a political figure and prolific writer. Despite a plain appearance, she was notoriously seductive and enjoyed whirlwind affairs with some of the most influential men of her time. She always attracted controversy, and was demonized by Napoleon for her forthrightness, the sheer power of her intellect, and the progressiveness of her salon, which was a hotbed for the expression of liberal ideals. The emperor exiled her, on and off, for the last fifteen years of her life.

Madame de Sta l force of nature, exuberant idealist, and ultimate enthusiast waged a lifelong struggle against all that was tyrannical, cynical, or passionless in her time, and left Europe a legacy of enlightened liberalism that radiated throughout the continent during the nineteenth century.

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