FAMOUS WOMEN SERIES.
THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY.
BY VERNON LEE.
One volume. 16mo. Cloth. Price $1.00.
“It is no disparagement to the many excellent previous sketches to say that ‘The Countess of Albany,’ by Vernon Lee, is decidedly the cleverest of the series of biographies of ‘Famous Women,’ published in this country by Roberts Brothers, Boston. In the present instance there is a freer subject, a little farther removed from contemporary events, and sufficiently out of the way of prejudice to admit of a lucid handling. Moreover, there is a trained hand at the work, and a mind not only familiar with and in sympathy with the character under discussion, but also at home with the ruling forces of the eighteenth century, which were the forces that made the Countess of Albany what she was. The biography is really dual, tracing the life of Alfieri, for twenty-five years the heart and soul companion of the Countess, quite as carefully as it traces that of the fixed subject of the sketch.”—Philadelphia Times.
“To be unable altogether to acquiesce in Vernon Lee’s portrait of Louise of Stolberg does not militate against our sense of the excellence of her work. Her pictures of eighteenth-century Italy are definite and brilliant. They are instinct with a quality that is akin to magic.”—London Academy.
“In the records of famous women preserved in the interesting series which has been devoted to such noble characters as Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Fry, and George Eliot, the life of the Countess of Albany holds a unique place. Louise of Albany, or Louise R., as she liked to sign herself, possessed a character famed, not for domestic virtues, nor even for peculiar wisdom and creative power, but rather notorious for an easy-going indifference to conventionality and a worldly wisdom and cynicism. Her life, which is a singular exponent of the false ideas prevalent upon the subject of love and marriage in the eighteenth century, is told by Vernon Lee in a vivid and discriminating manner. The biography is one of the most fascinating, if the most sorrowful, of the series.”—Boston Journal.
“She is the first really historical character who has appeared on the literary horizon of this particular series, her predecessors having been limited to purely literary women. This brilliant little biography is strongly written. Unlike preceding writers—German, French, and English—on the same subject, the author does not hastily pass over the details of the Platonic relations that existed between the Countess and the celebrated Italian poet ‘Alfieri.’ In this biography the details of that passionate friendship are given with a fidelity to truth, and a knowledge of its nature, that is based upon the strictest and most conscientious investigation, and access to means heretofore unattainable to other biographers. The history of this friendship is not only exceedingly interesting, but it presents a fascinating psychological study to those who are interested in the metaphysical aspect of human nature. The book is almost as much of a biography of ‘Alfieri’ as it is of the wife of the Pretender, who expected to become the Queen of England.”—Hartford Times.