Bluebird, or The Invention of Happiness

by Kohler, Sheila

• ISBN13: 9781590512623
• ISBN10: 1590512626
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-04-17
• Publisher: Other Press

Summary

Visit Sheila Kohler's website: www.sheilakohler.com "A triumph. Kohler brings the whole fascinating and terrible period of the French Revolution and its aftermath to life more graceful, more searching, more truly dramatic than most current fiction." Lyndall Gordon, author ofVindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft Bluebird, or The Invention of Happinessis a radiant and artful novel based on the life of Lucy Dillon, an 18th-century French aristocrat. Her intelligence, beauty, and lack of pretension made Lucy a favorite of luminaries like Talleyrand and Germaine de Staël and equipped her to survive the "Terror" that swept France in the wake of the Revolution. Possessed of considerable wit and practicality, Lucy manages to keep her beloved husband and small children safe while all her former circle, including King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, are guillotined. Eventually securing passage on a small ship bound for Boston, Lucy and her family settle in the Hudson Valley near Albany. Exhilarated by the personal and political freedom she finds in America, Lucy views her time there not as "exile," but rather as "opportunity" and the former palace darling proudly turns dairymaid, establishing a successful farm and embracing all the challenges and adventures the New World presents her. "Sheila Kohler is a writer's writer. Her cult admires her for her crisp style, her large conception of the novel, her virtuosity. Bluebird is a page-turner saga... Fiction is seldom written about practical, competent people; this novel is an ode to the half-Irish Lucy Dillon, the woman who had it all." Edmund White, author ofFanny: A Fiction

Author Biography

Sheila Kohler teaches at Bennington College in Vermont.