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The Life of Sarah Bernhardt
Yale University Press
October 2010
On Sale: September 21, 2010
256 pages
ISBN: 0300141270
EAN: 9780300141276
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Everything about Sarah Bernhardt is fascinating, from her
obscure birth to her glorious career—redefining the very
nature of her art—to her amazing (and highly public)
romantic life to her indomitable spirit. Well into her
seventies, after the amputation of her leg, she was
performing under bombardment for soldiers during World War
I, as well as crisscrossing America on her ninth American tour. Her family was also a source of curiosity: the mother she
adored and who scorned her; her two half-sisters, who died
young after lives of dissipation; and most of all, her son,
Maurice, whom she worshiped and raised as an aristocrat, in
the style appropriate to his presumed father, the Belgian
Prince de Ligne. Only once did they quarrel—over the Dreyfus
Affair. Maurice was a right-wing snob; Sarah, always proud
of her Jewish heritage, was a passionate Dreyfusard and Zolaist. Though the Bernhardt literature is vast, Gottlieb’s Sarah is
the first English-language biography to appear in decades.
Brilliantly, it tracks the trajectory through which an
illegitimate—and scandalous—daughter of a courtesan
transformed herself into the most famous actress who ever
lived, and into a national icon, a symbol of France.
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