My Double Life: The Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt (Women Writers in Translation) - Hardcover

Bernhardt, Sarah

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0791440532 ISBN 13: 9780791440537

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 1999

Synopsis

A translation of Ma Double Vie, the autobiography of the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was one of the classical theater's all-time greatest stars.

My Double Life is the autobiography of the French actress Sarah Bernhardt, who was internationally famed during her lifetime and afterwards as one of the classical theater's all-time greatest stars. Bernhardt's memoirs are composed with a novelist's (or actress's) sense of artistry and suspense that leaves no doubt of the charisma for which she was famed in her "double life," both on- and off-stage. Yet at the same time as this book very consciously contributes to the crafting of her image, it also illuminates a whole era: not only the world of theater, but also the worlds of women, politics, society, Europe and America, and, indeed, of history making itself.

About this title

About the Author

Victoria Tietze Larson is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics and General Humanities at Montclair State University. She is the author of The Role of Description in Senecan Tragedy.

Reviews

The most tempestuous and possibly the most famous actress of her time, Bernhardt (1844-1923) kept a coffin by her bedroom window in which she lay "to learn my parts." Needless to say, the border between acting and life was tenuous for her. Bernhardt's two-volume memoir was originally published in English in an anonymous translation in 1907; this new translation, gracefully accomplished despite occasional anachronisms ("gofer"), is an abridgment of the first volume. Bernhardt, illegitimate although with some family money on both sides, is presented as both melodramatic and frustratingly discreet. We never learn the identity of her father, nor anything significant about her son Maurice's birth (she doesn't even mention that he was illegitimate). A husband, unnamed, emerges only once from the shadows. Still, Bernhardt writes vividly and with apparent honesty about her "thin and sorrowful visage," her troublesome failures to abide by contracts, and occasions when she "performed very badly." Most memorable is the German siege of Paris in 1870- 1871, when she turned her theater, the Odeon, into a military hospital, scrounged for provisions in the isolated city and burned the seats and props for warmth. Despite her failure to deliver on the teasing promise of her title, Bernhardt can be quite winning. She concludes by remarking, "My life, which I had at first expected to be very short, now seemed likely to be very very long; and it gave me great joy to think of the infernal displeasure that would cause my enemies."
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0791440532
• ISBN 13: 9780791440537
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 345