Enfilade

From Norton:

Anne Higonnet, Liberty, Equality, Fashion: The Women Who Styled the French Revolution (New York: Norton, 2024), 304 pages, ISBN: 978-0393867954, $35.

Three women led a fashion revolution and turned themselves into international style celebrities.

Joséphine Bonaparte, future Empress of France; Térézia Tallien, the most beautiful woman in Europe; and Juliette Récamier, muse of intellectuals, had nothing left to lose. After surviving incarceration and forced incestuous marriage during the worst violence of the French Revolution of 1789, they dared sartorial revolt. Together, Joséphine and Térézia shed the underwear cages and massive, rigid garments that women had been obliged to wear for centuries. They slipped into light, mobile dresses, cropped their hair short, wrapped themselves in shawls, and championed the handbag. Juliette made the new style stand for individual liberty. The erotic audacity of these fashion revolutionaries conquered Europe, starting with Napoleon. Everywhere a fashion magazine could reach, women imitated the news coming from Paris. It was the fastest and most total change in clothing history. Two centuries ahead of its time, it was rolled back after only a decade by misogynist rumors of obscene extravagance. New evidence allows the real fashion revolution to be told. This is a story for our time: of a revolution that demanded universal human rights, of self-creation, of women empowering each other, and of transcendent glamor.

Anne Higonnet is professor of art history at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches a course called ‘Clothing’. She has received many awards, including Guggenheim and Harvard Radcliffe Institute fellowships.

From Chronicle Books:

Bridget Quinn, Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry, and Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard (New York: Chronicle Books, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1797211879, $30.

Discover the story of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard—a long-ignored artist and feminist of eighteenth-century France—in this imaginative and illuminating biography from an award-winning writer.

Summer in Paris, 1783. The Louvre steps, too hot and no breeze, the air electric with the heady anticipation of a coming storm: the year’s Royal Salon. Bewigged and powdered Parisians mill amid pigeons, dogs, and detritus; food and flower sellers; pamphleteers and propagandists. Men and women of every estate (clergy, nobles, commoners) are united under art: to love it, to despise it, to gossip endlessly about it.

Exhibiting at the Royal Salon was not for the faint of heart, and it was never intended for women.

Enter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard . . .

Born in Paris in 1749, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard rose from shopkeeper’s daughter to an official portraitist of the royal court—only to have her achievements reduced to ash by the French Revolution. While she defied societal barriers to become a member of the exclusive Académie Royale and a mentor for other ambitious women painters, she left behind few writings, and her legacy was long overshadowed by celebrated portraitist and memoirist Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.

But Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s story lives on. In this engaging biography, Bridget Quinn applies her insightful interpretation of art history to Labille-Guiard’s life. She offers a fascinating new perspective on the artist’s feminism, her sexuality, and her vision of the world. Quinn expertly blends close analyses of paintings with broader context about the era and inserts delicately fictionalized interpersonal scenes that fill the gaps in the historical record. This is a compelling and inspiring look at an artist too long overlooked. Despite numerous setbacks, Labille-Guiard built a legacy as an accomplished royal portraitist and a mentor to other young women artists of her era. This tale of solidarity, self-belief, and true passion for painting is sure to inspire contemporary creatives and women today.

Bridget Quinn is a writer, art historian, and critic. She is the author of the award-winning Broad Strokes: 15 Women Who Made Art and Made History (in That Order) and She Votes: How U.S. Women Won Suffrage, and What Happened Next. A graduate of New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and a regular contributor to the arts magazine Hyperallergic, Quinn is a sought-after speaker on women and art. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Forthcoming from Yale UP:

Bruce Boucher, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities: Reflections on an Architect and His Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0300275698, £35 / $45.

An in-depth study that sheds a fascinating new light on Sir John Soane (1753–1837) and his world-renowned collection

Sir John Soane’s architecture has enjoyed a revival of interest over the last seventy years, yet Soane as a collector—the strategy behind and motivation for Soane’s bequest to the nation—has remained largely unexplored. While Soane referred to the display of objects in his house and museum as “studies for my own mind,” he never explained what he meant by this, and the ambiguity surrounding his motivation remains perennially fascinating. This book illuminates a side of Soane’s personality unfamiliar to most students of his life and work by examining key strands in his collection and what they reveal about Soane and the psychology of collecting. Topics include the display of antiquities; his fascination with ruins, both literal and figurative; his singular response to Gothic architecture; and his investment in modern British painting and sculpture. These aspects are bookended by an introductory biographical chapter that highlights the ways in which his family and career informed his collecting habits as well as an epilogue that analyses the challenges of turning a private house and collection into a public museum.

Bruce Boucher is an art historian and curator who served as director of Sir John Soane’s Museum from 2016 to 2023. Specializing in Italian Renaissance, Baroque, and Neo-classical art and architecture, he is the author of a number of books, including The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, Andrea Palladio: The Architect in his Time, and Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova.

Forthcoming from Reaktion, with distribution by The University of Chicago Press:

Julie Peakman, Libertine London: Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Metropolis (London: Reaktion Books, 2024), 352 pages, £25 / $40.

An eye-opening and richly detailed history of women’s sexuality that upends entrenched perceptions of the long eighteenth century.

Libertine London investigates the sex lives of women throughout the period 1680 to 1830, known as the long eighteenth century. The book uncovers the various experiences of women, whether as mistresses, adultresses, or as participants in the sex trade. From renowned courtesans to downtrodden streetwalkers, it examines the multifaceted lives of these women within brothels, on stage, and even behind bars. Based on new research in court transcripts, asylum records, magazines, pamphlets, satires, songs, theater plays, and erotica, Libertine London reveals the gruesome treatment of women who were sexually active outside of marriage. Julie Peakman looks at sex from women’s points of view, undercutting the traditional image of the bawdy eighteenth century to expose a more sordid side, which often left women distressed, ostracized, and vilified for their sexual behavior.

Julie Peakman is a historian and author of many books on the history of sexuality, including Amatory Pleasures: Explorations in Eighteenth-Century Sexual Cultures. She lives in London.

c o n t e n t s

Prologue
1  Rambles through London
2  Street-Walkers
3  Brazen Bawds
4  Courtesans
5  Public Opinion: The Way with Whores
6  Stage Strumpets
7  Libertines and Their Fashions
8  Quacks, the Pox, and the New Sexual Predators
9  Mad about the Boy
10  Rape on Trial
11  Seduction, Abduction, and Adultery
12  Royal Mistresses

References
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

From Simon & Schuster:

Antonia Fraser, Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit (New York: Pegasus Books, 2023), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-1639364053, $29.

The vivid and dramatic life of Lady Caroline Lamb, whose scandalous love affair with Lord Byron overshadowed her own creativity and desire to break free from society’s constraints.

From the outset, Caroline Lamb had a rebellious nature. From childhood she grew increasingly troublesome, experimenting with sedatives like laudanum, and she had a special governess to control her. She also had a merciless wit and talent for mimicry. She spoke French and German fluently, knew Greek and Latin, and sketched impressive portraits. As the niece of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, she was already well connected, and her courtly skills resulted in her marriage to the Hon. William Lamb (later Lord Melbourne) at the age on nineteen. For a few years they enjoyed a happy marriage, despite Lamb’s siblings and mother-in-law detesting her and referring to her as “the little beast.” In 1812 Caroline embarked on a well-publicised affair with the poet Lord Byron—he was 24, she 26. Her phrase “mad, bad and dangerous to know” became his lasting epitaph. When he broke things off, Caroline made increasingly public attempts to reunite. Her obsession came to define much of her later life, as well as influencing her own writing—most notably the Gothic novel Glenarvon—and Byron’s. Antonia Fraser’s vividly compelling biography animates the life of ‘a free spirit’ who was far more than mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

Antonia Fraser is the author of many widely acclaimed historical works which have been international bestsellers. She was awarded the Medlicott Medal by the Historical Association in 2000 and was made a DBE in 2011 for services to literature. Her previous books include Mary Queen of Scots; King Charles II; The Weaker Vessel: Woman’s Lot in Seventeenth-Century England, which won the Wolfson History Prize; Marie Antoinette: The Journey; Perilous Question; The King and the Catholics; and The Wives of Henry VIII. Must You Go?, a memoir of her life with Harold Pinter, was published in 2010, and My History: A Memoir of Growing Up in 2015. Fraser’s The Case of the Married Woman is available from Pegasus Books. She lives in London.