The Precious Lies of Madeleine de Scudry: Her Admirable and Infuriating Life. Book 2 - Softcover

Dugan, Eleanor Knowles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0979099412 ISBN 13: 9780979099410

Publisher: Grand Cyrus Press, 2009

Synopsis

Madeleine de Scudéry was the bestselling novelist in seventeenth-century Europe, translated into a half-dozen languages including English and Arabic. She was forced to publish under her brother's name and achieved such fame that he was elected to the Académie Française. She lived in a time of dark savagery and cynicism, yet she persisted in believing in kindness, compassion, loyalty, and joy. She sought absolute anonymity and gained only notoriety. And for what was she notorious? For profligacy and prudery, for passionate sensuality and icy frigidity, for arrogance and shyness, for vanity and modesty, for outrageous falsehoods and painful honesty. She was accused of corrupting the morals of the most licentious age since Caligula's, and then accused (by the same enemies) of being a virgin! She spoke out eloquently against the slavery of marriage and love, and she became involved in one of the most profound, impassioned, intense, enduring, and unlikely love affairs in history. She was a meek and servile woman who enraged her inferiors, an arrogant poseur who delighted princes, a forceful feminist who sulked and flirted and pretended to be stupid. Ridiculed for being dour, crabbed, and humorless, she beguiled, enchanted, enthralled. She was, in short, a paragon of paradox. And she has been utterly forgotten.

About this title

From the Author:

In 1982, I was researching the life of a 17th century poet for an opera libretto and ran across Dorothy McDougall's 1938 biography of Madeleine de Scudéry. (I was the first person to check the book out of the San Francisco Public Library since 1943!) When I finished reading the book, I had learned two things:

1. The book contained no information useful for my libretto.

2. I was in love with Madeleine de Scudéry.

This encounter led finally and inevitably to these pages. It was not an easy trip. I am a fairly facile writer and have rarely spent more than four months on a book from start to finish, but Madeleine stymied me. Yes, I amassed masses of information, but then I sat staring at the blank page, something I'd never done. How could I possibly tell her enormously complex story without intruding myself and my perceptions in it? Years passed. Then I realized that I must tell her story and the best, the only way to do so was to explain what in her life resonated in mine. Thus this book is a "bioautography," the story of what I learned about her and its relations to our own times as I pursued the details of her admirable and infuriating life. A life in which fiction may reveal more than fact.

About the Author:

Eleanor Knowles Dugan is the author, coauthor, or ghostwriter of more than 30 books and hundreds of magazine articles, mostly on communications, memory, and business writing topics. Her 2006 book, The Films of Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy, was described as "magnificent" by Classic Images magazine, and named "One of the 10 best books of the year," receiving the Merrill T. McCord Award for Best Researched Film Book of the year. She is currently based in San Francisco.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Cyrus Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0979099412
• ISBN 13: 9780979099410
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224