The life of Marie d'Agoult, alias Daniel Stern / Phyllis Stock-Morton.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Stock-Morton, Phyllis, 1930-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Stern, Daniel, 1805-1876.

Stern, Daniel.

Authors, French--19th century--Biography.

Authors, French.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

viii, 283 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Summary:

Marie de Flavigny (1805-1876), countess d'Agoult, in later life was called by her friends "an Amazon of thought." One of nineteenth-century France's free and independent women long before feminism came into its own, she was Franz Liszt's lover, a friend of George Sand, and a writer under the name Daniel Stern. She bore two children by her marriage with count d'Agoult and three by Liszt, including Cosima, who would leave her first husband to marry Richard Wagner.

Despite strains in her personal life (she never gained legal custody of her children and was disinherited by her own family), she made her Paris salon a multilingual center of European artists, writers, and revolutionaries. Through them she partook in and wrote about the great events of her lifetime, including France's 1848 revolution. History has not treated her well despite her stature in her own times because much of what we know of her has been written by partisans for Liszt or Sand. In this new biography, historian Phyllis Stock-Morton corrects this oversight, taking Marie d'Agoult out of the shadows of Liszt and Sand and allowing her to be recognized in her own right.

Contents:

1 "They believe that children born at midnight have a mysterious nature, are closer than others to the spirit world, are more visited with dreams and apparitions." 7

2 "What woman would not secretly consent to live on an altar, mute and veiled, to breathe the pure incense of sacrifice?" 22

3 "This need for exclusiveness, this need to be loved totally, has dominated all the feelings of my life." 39

4 "Alas, alas, where to find again such flights, such madness?" 55

5 "You need wide horizons, the infinite, the boundless and the unforeseen, whereas I need rules, a full program, the feeling of doing my duty, a set pace." 72

6 "Daniel. It was the name I had given to one of my children, the name of the prophet saved from the lion's den. Among all the Bible stories, that one pleased me most." 89

7 "Nonnenwerth, the tomb of my chimeras, of my ideal life, the ashes of my hopes!" 105

8 "The people is an eternal poet, in whom nature and passion inspire spontaneously touching beauties that art only painstakingly reproduces through grandiose effects." 120

9 "All direct action, all participation in public affairs being by custom denied to women, celebrity is for them only a vain and irritating excitation, a resounding isolation." 137

10 "I have taken more care than necessary in order to be always exact; my research has been minute, even in what concerns inconsiderable persons and facts." 151

11 "I love politics. It is for me the greatest of the arts: architecture with the building blocks of knowledge." 168

12 "Differently, but as completely as man, woman is created with a view to rational activity, whose principle is freedom, whose aim is progress, and whose exercize, within a society perpetually being transformed, cannot be arbitrarily circumscribed or determined." 187

13 "When a woman has created her life herself, and that life has not been governed by the common rules, she becomes in everyone's eyes responsible for it, more responsible than a man." 206

14 "I have never felt entirely French or entirely German but apart, isolated, somewhat foreign as well in the country where I was born as in that where destiny had me live." 226.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0801863139

OCLC:

42397992