Join us for an evening with author Sarah Horowitz, who will be speaking about her new book, The Red Widow: The Scandal that Shook Paris and the Woman Behind it All. A conversation with author Jennifer Sessions will follow. This in-person event will be cosponsored by Alliance Française de Charlottesville and will be free and open to the public. We recommend arriving early for the best seating.
About the Book: Parisian society hostess Marguerite “Meg” Steinheil broke every rule in the bourgeois book—and got away with it. Known for sleeping with many elite Frenchmen, Meg was thrown into infamy when her lover, President Félix Faure, died of a stroke during one of their encounters.
A real-life femme fatale who left a trail of death and destruction in her wake, Meg became known as the “Red Widow” for mysteriously surviving a home invasion that left both her husband and mother dead. More than just a rollicking and entertaining tale, Meg’s life is a window into the dazzling glamor, art, and romanticism of bourgeois Paris. An unforgettable true account of sex, scandal, and murder, The Red Widow is the story of a woman determined to rise—at any cost.
Sarah Horowitz has a PhD in modern European history from UC Berkeley and is core faculty in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at Washington and Lee University. She teaches classes on French history from the seventeenth century to the present, as well as the history of gender and sexuality in modern Europe. She also teaches courses on crime and scandal and Parisian life and history. Her book The Red Widow: The Scandal that Shook Paris and the Woman Behind it All will be released from Sourcebooks early this fall.
Jennifer Sessions is associate professor of history and an affiliated faculty member in French at UVA, where her research and teaching focus on politics, culture, and colonial empire in modern France and modern Europe. She is the author of By Sword and Plow: France and the Conquest of Algeria (Cornell, 2011), an award-winning history of the origins of French colonialism in Algeria. She is now studying a 1901 Algerian uprising against French rule and the monster trial of over a hundred accused insurgents that followed.
The Red Widow will be released on September 6. To order the authors’ books, please see below for the New Dominion Bookshop book order form or call the shop at 434-295-2552.
"Horowitz takes readers on a rollicking ride through the depraved world of the Parisian elite. Wonderfully researched and exquisitely written, Horowitz’s book is a reminder that truth really is stranger than fiction."
—Nimisha Barton, award-winning author of Reproductive Citizens
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