to be the fille d'alliance of Michel de Montaigne is to be better than a princess'
By sally tarbox on 5 Aug. 2012
Format: Paperback
Historical novel, based on the bookish Marie de Gounay who discovers the essays of Michel de Montaigne and resolves to meet the great man and to become part of the literary world herself - unheard of in the late 1500s.
'The more she read and the more Latin she learned,the more it seemed to Marie that an entire and good life might be spent in the company of books. Any other of the few possibilities open to her would be an interruption to her reading...She resolved to be neither a nun nor a wife. She could see nothing wrong with just reading books.'
Marie does meet the -much older- Montaigne, and becomes his 'adopted' daughter (a fact of which she makes much throughout the rest of her life.) Her own somewhat over-the-top literary efforts have limited success; most of her time is devoted to helping revise Montaigne's works.
While Marie certainly achieved things most 16th century women never dreamt of, her life was largely spent poring over manuscripts, and as such she is perhaps an unlikely subject for a book. A fallible character, she nonetheless remained a little 2-dimensional for me. ( )

apr 2013
Michel Montaigne & Marie Gournay 1565 1643
dour, hard to endure, could be readable if edited to half of its lenght

I really wanted to like this - a book by Jenny Diski about Montaigne - but despite a promising start, I found it to be ultimately repetitive and grim, grim grim.....