The Girl Who Loved Camellias: The Life and Legend of Marie Duplessis

Kavanagh (contributing editor, Economist; Nureyev: The Life) introduces to a new generation of readers Marie Duplessis (1824–47), a gritty and gutsy young woman who overcame abandonment by her mother and sexual exploitation by her father to captivate 1840s Paris before dying tragically at the age of 23. Dubbed "the lady of the camellias" because of her ostentatious attachment to that hothouse status symbol, the peasant girl-turned- courtesan was the romantic muse for a host of artists—Alexandre Dumas fils, Franz Liszt, Giuseppe Verdi, and others. The beautiful and witty coquette's life became the basis for Dumas's novel La Dame aux Camélias, which became a play (with Sarah Bernhardt in 1852) and an opera, Verdi's La Traviata, in 1853, with several later portraits of Camille on film, most notably Greta Garbo's in 1936. While Kavanagh strives to separate Duplessis from the mythology around her, she has some difficulty doing so owing to a paucity of historical sources. The result is a narrative that's difficult to follow at times, especially for readers unfamiliar with the literary and musical renditions.