Sarah
The Life of Sarah Bernhardt
Everything about Sarah Bernhardt is fascinating, from her obscure birth to her glorious career – redefining the very nature of her art – to her amazing (and highly public) romantic life to her indomitable spirit. Well into her seventies, after the amputation of her leg, she was performing under bombardment for soldiers during World War I, as well as crisscrossing America on her ninth American tour. Her family was also a source of curiosity: the mother she adored and who scorned her; her two half-sisters, who died young after lives of dissipation; and most of all, her son, Maurice, whom she worshiped and raised as an aristocrat, in the style appropriate to his presumed father, the Belgian Prince de Ligne. Only once did they quarrel – over the Dreyfus Affair. Maurice was a right-wing snob; Sarah, always proud of her Jewish heritage, was a passionate Dreyfusard and Zolaist. Though the Bernhardt literature is vast, Gottlieb's Sarah is the first English-language biography to appear in decades. Brilliantly, it tracks the trajectory through which an illegitimate – and scandalous – daughter of a courtesan transformed herself into the most famous actress who ever lived, and into a national icon, a symbol of France.
About the Author
Robert Gottlieb is the author of the acclaimed "Balanchine: The Ballet Maker". He writes for the "New York Review of Books", "The New Yorker", and other publications, and is dance critic for the "New York Observer". His career in publishing – as editor in chief of "Simon and Schuster", "Alfred A. Knopf', and "The New Yorker" – is legendary.
Reviews
"A book that is wise, funny, affectionate and enjoyable as well as blessedly compact" – John Carey, Sunday Times
"A fabulous story and Gottlieb has produced a brilliant short biography, telling you everything you want to know in 200 pages. He's especially good at analysing what Sarah's magic was but there was so much of it you'll have to read the book to find out" – Duncan Fallowell, Daily Express
"Robert Gottlieb is a firmly even-handed biographer and his engagingly zippy account focuses particularly on exposing the cracks in the contradictory stories that Bernhardt and her hagiographers assembled about her life... This is a sterling biography, equal to its subject" – Olivia Laing, The Observer
"Although Bernhardt's fame is universal and the literature about her immense, the major postwar English language biographies have long been out of print... Gottlieb's succinct survey is timely" – Rupert Christiansen, Literary Review
"Suave, intelligent, always slyly entertaining" – Terry Castle, London Review Of Books
"A riveting account of a life lived in the spotlight" – Richard Edmonds, Birmingham Post
