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Jump to navigationJump to searchThe Beauty of Her Age: A Tale of Sex, Scandal and Money in Victorian England by Jenifer Roberts (view source)
Revision as of 15:21, 25 August 2020
, 15:21, 25 August 2020no edit summary
As a comparatively young and lively widow, her life was by no means over. Returning to Paris just as the Second Empire under Emperor Napoleon III was at the height of its splendour, and where her rather loose morals and past history were not held against her as they were in the more censorious Britain, she was in her element. Having seduced Colonel Claremont, the British military attaché in Paris, she was soon part of an unashamed menage à trois, the deeply hurt but self-effacing Frances Claremont bowing to her husband's insistence that she stay with him. It remained a comfortable and relatively happy existence (for two of them, at least) until his death in 1890, with both wife and mistress following him to the grave within four years.
A chronicle of one woman's life in nineteenth -century England and France, this book makes a very entertaining read and period piece with its background of life in both countries, especially with its glimpses of Parisian society during the turbulent times around the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870. Nobody could pretend that Yolande Stephens led the most virtuous or indeed useful of lives, but as a window on the existence of one woman who seemed to have led an extraordinarily charmed life after an unpromising start to her days, one cannot help feeling that maybe she deserved many of the good things that came to her, even if the price was in part the happiness of someone else's wife.
For more unconventional if less fortunate contemporary lives, [[Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England by Sarah Wise]] is also recommended. You might also appreciate [[Victoria's Madmen: Revolution and Alienation by Clive Bloom]].
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