Susan Taylor-Leduc earned both her masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1992, she has worked as a teacher, curator and university administrator in Paris. She is currently affiliated with the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles.

Winner of the prestigious J.B. Jackson Book Prize in the 2023 Landscape Studies Initiative awards from the Center for Cultural Landscapes. "Taylor-Leduc traces the lasting effects of the queen’s garden legacy across three generations of French imperial consorts as Empresses Joséphine, Marie-Louise, and Eugénie asserted their own agency through garden spaces that echoed aspects of their predecessor’s innovations. Taylor-Leduc concludes that the gardens at the Petit Trianon and, later, Malmaison were not extravagant personal spaces for dissimulation or frivolity. Rather, these carefully curated landscapes carved out spaces for women consorts’ empowerment and celebrity while upholding societal and court expectations of femininity and etiquette." -- Amanda Strasik, CAA Reviews

• Acknowledgements List of Illustrations Introduction : Spatial Legacies Prologue : Consorts & Fashionistas I: A Gambling Queen: Marie-Antoinette’s Gamescapes (1775-1789) II: Revolutionary Surprises (1789-1804) III: A Créole Empress: Joséphine at Malmaison (1799-1809) IV : The Imperial Picturesque: Napoléon, Joséphine and Marie-Louise (1810-14) V: Empress Eugénie and the Universal Exhibition of 1867 Epilogue Index