Writer Leslie Carroll learns the Versailles Glide.
This post on Catherine Delors’ very entertaining blog led me to two interesting posts about historical fiction book covers on writer Julianne Douglas’s Writing the Renaissance blog:
Knowing a book by its cover
Dream covers
Personally, I hate the “headless woman” cover craze. You can read my earlier comments on the subject here:
Perkin Warbeck’s chin
I like to see portraits or old paintings on book covers, and it annoys me to see them cut off in weird places, or with the faces (usually female) unnecessarily obscured.
As Catherine Delors mentions in her post, Sheramy from the blog Van Gogh’s Chair commented on Julianne Douglas’s original post, “The point of much historical fiction is to give faces and voices to women of the past, and then the covers take their faces away.” Exactly!
For example, the cover of Sena Jeter Naslund’s novel Abundance, which is about Marie Antoinette:
This illustration doesn’t say “French court” or “Marie Antoinette” to me. It says “anonymous woman holding ugly fan at strange angle.”
What a wasted opportunity, when the cover could have looked like this:
Now, that says Marie Antoinette to me, probably because it IS Marie Antoinette (public domain image from Wikimedia).
I would love to see that on the cover of a book because, as I said before, I like looking at historical portraits. And a portrait isn’t a portrait without a face.
So please, publishers, bring back the faces. You’ll sell more books that way — at least when I’m the one buying the books.
(P.S. I took the title of this post from a C.S. Lewis novel that doesn’t have anything to do with book covers — but it’s a good book.)
From Elena Maria Vidal’s Tea at Trianon blog, here’s an interview with Susan Nagel, author of Marie-Thérèse, Child of Terror: The Fate of Marie Antoinette’s Daughter.
Elena Maria Vidal herself is the author of Trianon: A Novel of Royal France (about Marie Antoinette) and Madame Royale (about Marie-Therese).
French president Nicolas Sarkozy recently spent his wedding night with former supermodel Carla Bruni at “the opulent Palace of Versailles… ensuring that his foreign bride would, as with all first ladies, spark comparisons with the ill-fated Marie Antoinette.”
There is no shortage of articles and blog posts comparing Ms. Bruni to Marie Antoinette, including this one from novelist Catherine Delors: In the grand tradition of French royal mistresses: Marie-Antoinette, Sarkozy & Bruni
As it happens, Catherine Delors is the author of the forthcoming novel Mistress of the Revolution, which is set during the French Revolution.
This article caught my eye because it repeats the old story about Princess Diana fans throwing bread rolls at Prince Charles’s then-mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles (who, of course, is now his second wife).
The article says Camilla’s supposed bread-pelting was due to “anger at Diana’s death.” But I heard this story BEFORE Diana’s death! I remember being told about it in an online chat room by Diana fans who weren’t angry at all. They were simply amused by the rumor (OK, very amused), and they hoped that Diana had heard about it, too.
I don’t know if the infamous Supermarket Incident ever happened, but the way this story is apparently being used today — as evidence that Camilla was treated as a scapegoat after Diana’s death — makes me suspect that it didn’t happen at all, that it’s a legend like Marie Antoinette’s famous non-quote, “Let them eat cake.”
But it appears that possibly someone really did say, “Let them eat cake,” or words to that effect. It just wasn’t Marie Antoinette. So who knows: Maybe the Supermarket Incident did happen, but Charles and Camilla were the ones in that supermarket, pelting Princess Diana with bread rolls. Uh oh. I hope I didn’t just start another rumor.
The Chevalier de Saint-Georges was “the toast of 18th-century Paris. So how come the composer… has been forgotten?”
Caroline Weber says French queen Marie Antoinette “may have shopped until she dropped, but she had pressing political reasons for doing so.”
Weber is the author of Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution.
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