Jessica Mann
Everybody Loved Her
THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE has already been the subject of nearly sixty biographies, not to mention countless historical novels, and Andrea Stuart makes no claim to have unearthed new facts. But she makes the story exciting and touching, and her original take on its heroine’s life is derived from a sense of personal identification. Both women were descended from plantation dynasties, born in the Caribbean, brought in mid-adolescence to the old world and forced to find their own way of surviving in a terrifyingly unfamiliar society. Joséphine (always referred to here by her original name, Rose) is portrayed as an immigrant whose survival in a foreign society during dangerous times depended on her developing feminine wiles and self-protective cunning.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire
‘"I feel", Lowell told Hardwick ... "as if I were pulled apart and thinning into mist, or rather being torn apart and still preferring that state to making a decision."'
Richard Davenport-Hines on the letters of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/yours-unfaithfully-2