Review of Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse, a Tiger among the Bluestockings
As a teenager Fauques’ father was very ill and her mother had to take over the running of the household and finances. By forcing her daughters to become nuns, there would be no dowries to pay, and they would also have to renounce their claim to the family property, leaving all the money, income, and properties to their greedy mother! Fauques detested life as a nun and she had to wait many years before she could apply for her release.
Anne-Marie was a risk taker. She wrote a book denouncing the tyranny of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, which became a bestseller. To avoid being sent to the Bastille, Fauques fled to England. In total she wrote twenty books in French and English. She had many disastrous love affairs, and she went to prison for debt. Fauques was also an animal rights advocate, in a time where most people didn’t care. And she had an extraordinary ability to counterfeit people’s handwriting!
Fauques married later in life when she was sixty. She married for love and although the odds were stacked against the couple, and people gossiped about her husband being much younger than her, the two had a happy marriage, although they were heavily in debt for much of it. Her husband was distraught when she died.
What a fascinating woman Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse was! I don’t recall reading about her before, and if I did, I sadly didn’t retain the information. She was what we would now call a feminist. Eccentric, brilliant and unpredictable, she is the sort of historical figure that should have a movie or TV series made about her life! Gasper’s biography is the only one I have seen about Fauques, and I commend them for their research, as many of Anne-Marie’s writings were published anonymously, under different names or with vague hints that she could be the author. There seems to be a lot of confusion and mis-information about her, so I think Gasper did a fantastic job.
This book was a real joy to read, I highly recommend it!
You can buy your copy: here
Julia Gasper's twitter: @Castafi0re"
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