Voltaire in Love

Description

Nancy Mitford's account of this famous love affair of the Enlightenment is, in the author's own words, 'a shriek from beginning to end' The meeting of Voltaire, successful financier, famous poet and troublemaker, and the enchanting amateur physicist and countess milie du Ch telet, was a meeting of both hearts and minds. In the Ch teau de Cirey, the two brilliant intellects scandalised the French aristocracy with their passionate love affair and provoked revolutions both political and scientific with their groundbreaking work in literature, philosophy and physics. Nancy Mitford's account of the love affair of the Enlightenment is, in the author's own words, 'a shriek from beginning to end'.

Nancy Mitford was born in London on November 28 1904, daughter of the second Baron Redesdale, and the eldest of six girls. Her sisters included Lady Diana Mosley; Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire and Jessica, who immortalised the Mitford family in her autobiography Hons and Rebels. The Mitford sisters came of age during the Roaring Twenties and wartime in London, and were well known for their beauty, upper-class bohemianism or political allegiances. Nancy contributed columns to The Lady and the Sunday Times, as well as writing a series of popular novels including The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, which detailed the high-society affairs of the six Radlett sisters. While working in London during the Blitz, Nancy met and fell in love with Gaston Palewski, General de Gaulle's chief of staff, and eventually moved to Paris to be near him. In the 1950s she began writing historical biographies - her life of Louis XIV, The Sun King, became an international bestseller. Nancy completed her last book, Frederick the Great, before she died of Hodgkin's disease on 30 June 1973.

Mitford writes with a profound sympathy for the 17th and 18th century, and Voltaire in Love caps her career as the nonpareil popular biographer of that era * Washington Post * One of the most blissfully entertaining books in our language * New Yorker * Nancy Mitford softened the image of the leader of the French Enlightenment with a witty little book called Voltaire in Love. Mitford took pleasure in showing that the celebrated reformer was much more than a desiccated brainbox * Independent *