Francine Du Plessix Gray – författare

Lovers and Tyrants is at once an erotic, urgent, and beautifully written novel that established Francine du Plessix Gray as one of the most brilliant and exuberant fiction talents to emerge in America’s literary history. This is the story of Stephanie, whose life we follow from her extraordinary childhood in France, through her father's mysterious disappearance, her emigration with her mother to America, her private schooling in New York, her tempestuous sexual relationships with a European nobleman, her marriage to an American, her children, and ultimately, her self-liberation. Every phase of Stephanie’s life illustrates our painful ambivalence toward the irreconcilable poles of love and liberation, security and freedom.

Tatiana du Plessix, the wife of a French diplomat, was a beautiful, sophisticated "white Russian" who had been the muse of the famous Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Alexander Liberman, the ambitious son of a prominent Russian Jew, was a gifted magazine editor and aspiring artist. As part of the progressive artistic Russian émigré community living in Paris in the 1930s, the two were destined to meet. They began a passionate affair, and the year after Paris was occupied in World War II they fled to New York with Tatiana''s young daughter, Francine.

There they determinedly rose to the top of high society, holding court to a Who''s Who list of the midcentury''s intellectuals and entertainers. Flamboyant and outrageous, bold and brilliant, they were irresistible to friends like Marlene Dietrich, Salvador Dalí, and the publishing tycoon Condé Nast. But to those who knew them well they were also highly neurotic, narcissistic, and glacially self-promoting, prone to cut out of their lives, with surgical precision, close friends who were no longer of use to them.

Tatiana became an icon of New York fashion, and the hats she designed for Saks Fifth Avenue were de rigueur for stylish women everywhere. Alexander Liberman, who devotedly raised Francine as his own child from the time she was nine, eventually came to preside over the entire Condé Nast empire. The glamorous life they shared was both creative and destructive and was marked by an exceptional bond forged out of their highly charged love and raging self-centeredness. Their obsessive adulation of success and elegance was elevated to a kind of worship, and the high drama that characterized their lives followed them to their deaths. Tatiana, increasingly consumed with nostalgia for a long-lost Russia, spent her last years addicted to painkillers. Shortly after her death, Alexander, then age eighty, shocked all who knew him by marrying her nurse.

Them: A Portrait of Parents is a beautifully written homage to the extraordinary lives of two fascinating, irrepressible people who were larger than life emblems of a bygone age. Written with honesty and grace by the person who knew them best, this generational saga is a survivor''s story. Tatiana and Alexander survived the Russian Revolution, the fall of France, and New York''s factory of fame. Their daughter, Francine, survived them.

A “spellbinding” and “deeply intelligent” historical novel about Marie Antoinette on the eve of the French Revolution (The Washington Post )Through the untold love story between Marie Antoinette and Swedish aristocrat Axel von Fersen, acclaimed author Francine du Plessix Gray weaves history with romance in a captivating novel that also offers a fresh vision of the French Revolution.Paris, 1774. The dashing nobleman meets nineteen-year-old Marie Antoinette at a masquerade ball. As their relationship deepens at Versailles, Fersen discovers the court’s secrets, even the startling erotic details of Marie Antoinette’s marriage. But this intimacy is disrupted when he leaves to join the American Revolution. When he returns in 1783, he finds France on the brink of disintegration. After the Revolution of 1789, the royal family is moved to the Tuileries and suffers increasingly harsh captivity. After a failed attempt to liberate them, Fersen goes home to Sweden where he soon meets his own tragic end: his fate is symbolic of the violent pace with which of the eighteenth century’s events transformed European culture.

Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), one of the most perplexing personalities of Western culture, has been called 'the freest spirit who ever lived' and 'a frenetic and abominable assemblage of all crimes and obscenities'. Yet scant attention has been given to the two women who were the catalysts of his fate: his loyal, tolerant wife, Renee-Pelagie, and his vindictive mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil. This groundbreaking account vividly brings to life these two dynamic women and the complex bonds they evolved with the rakish Marquis, as they dedicated themselves to protecting, curbing and, ultimately, confining him. Francine du Plessix Gray draws on thousands of pages of correspondence between the magnetic, aristocratic Marquis de Sade and his plain, bourgeois wife, to explore in historical and psychological detail what it was like to live with this maverick adventurer and man of letters in the decades before the French Revolution. She brilliantly recreates the extravagant hedonism and corruption of late-18th-century France, the ensuing Terror, and the oppression of the Napoleonic regime under which de Sade spent his last years.