The Magnificent Mrs. Tennant

Gertrude Tennant's life was remarkable for its length (1819-1918), but even more so for the influence she achieved as an unsurpassed London hostess. The salon she established when widowed in her early fifties attracted legions of celebrities, among them Gladstone and Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Thomas Huxley, John Everett Millais, Henry James, and Robert Browning. In her youth she had a fling with Gustave Flaubert, and in her later years she became the redoubtable mother-in-law to the explorer Henry Morton Stanley. But as a woman in a male-dominated world, Mrs. Tennant has been remembered mainly as a footnote in the lives of eminent men.This book recovers the lost life of Gertrude Tennant, drawing on a treasuretrove of recently discovered family papers - thousands of letters, including two dozen original letters from Flaubert to Gertrude, dozens of diaries, and many other unpublished documents relating to Stanley and other famous figures of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. David Waller presents Gertrude Tennant's life in colourful detail, placing her not only at the heart of a multi-generational, matriarchal family epic but also at the centre of European social, literary, and intellectual life for the best part of a century.

ISBN 0300139357   Pages 336 ISBN13 9780300139358 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Yale University Press   Weight (grammes) 676 Imprint Yale University Press   Published in New Haven Format Hardback   Height (mm) 234 Publication date 14 Apr 2009   Width (mm) 156 Library of Congress 2008051692   Spine width (mm) 30 DEWEY 942.081092   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

		List of Illustrations
		Family Trees
Ch. 1		How I Found Gertrude Tennant		1
Ch. 2		Born into a Long Line of Heroes		9
Ch. 3		Early Adventures		16
Ch. 4		Arrival in Paris		23
Ch. 5		Unsentimental Education		39
Ch. 6		Gertrude Meets Her Future Husband		46
Ch. 7		Gertrude Enters Society		53
Ch. 8		The Marriage Market		63
Ch. 9		Phantoms of Trouville		70
Ch. 10		At Home with the Flauberts		81
Ch. 11		An Improbable Romance		98
Ch. 12		Portrait of a Marriage		109
Ch. 13		Charles's Angel in the House?		120
Ch. 14		Births and Deaths		126
Ch. 15		Rita and Emma: Two Literary Heroines		142
Ch. 16		Les Miserables		151
Ch. 17		Moving Up in the World		166
Ch. 18		Gertrude's Dark Night of the Soul		183
Ch. 19		Re-entering the Marriage Market		187
Ch. 20		Reunited with an Old Flame		196
Ch. 21		An Eligible Match		208
Ch. 22		The Delicious Dolly		214
Ch. 23		A Salon in Whitehall		221
Ch. 24		Bula Matari in the Drawing-Room		230
Ch. 25		Dolly's Choices		238
		More...

"Mr. Waller traces with care the filaments of larger historical forces that intertwine with the finer threads of Gertrude''s single life . . . . Through Gertrude and her expansive, democratic social tastes, Mr. Waller offers a tapestry of the ideas and people of the age -- each one delicately interconnected with the rest."--Emily Wilkinson, "The Washington Times"--Emily Wilkinson"Washington Times" (06/19/2009)

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