Since the overwhelming number of memoirs by women (and men too) of the era are by people who excoriate the revolution, write of the injustices and tragedies they experienced, as in Marilyin Yalom’s Blood Sisters, the memoir even in its present state is a valuable document. It has, alas, been framed and presented as a scandal memoir of the later 18th century because the writer was a woman who lived a sexually free life. It is known for its concentration on a crisis time: Paris during the beginning of the terror.
Grace Dalrymple Elliot’s (ca 1754-1824) memoir, Journal de ma vie, reveals something of the life of a woman of the later 18th through early 19th century who lived richly and among the powerful of three different countries at the price of acceding to giving up most of her close relationships with others.
I was reminded two nights ago of a woman who probably originally wrote a pro-revolution memoir, one which now appears in its disjointed broken-backed way to be simply or unexaminedly royalist in outlook.
This is the story of a story that has been mistold.
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