Wondrous Beauty (Paperback) | Released: 04 Nov 2014

From the award-winning historian and author of Revolutionary Mothers, here is the remarkable life of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, renowned as the most beautiful woman of nineteenth-century Baltimore, whose marriage in 1803 to Jérôme Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte, became inextricably bound to the diplomatic and political histories of the United States, France, and England.

In Wondrous Beauty, Carol Berkin tells the story of this audacious, outsized life. We see how the news of the union infuriated Napoleon and resulted in his banning the then ­pregnant Betsy Bonaparte from disembarking in any European port, offering his brother the threat of remaining married to that "American girl" and forfeiting all wealth and power--or renouncing her, marrying a woman of Napoleon's choice, and reaping the benefits.

Jérôme ended the marriage posthaste and was made king of Westphalia; Betsy fled to England, gave birth to her son and only child, Jérôme's namesake, and was embraced by the English press, who boasted that their nation had opened its arms to the cruelly abandoned young wife.

Berkin writes that this naïve, headstrong American girl returned to Baltimore a wiser, independent woman, refusing to seek social redemption or a return to obscurity through a quiet marriage to a member of Baltimore's merchant class. Instead she was courted by many, indifferent to all, and initiated a dangerous game of politics--a battle for a pension from Napoleon--which she won: her pension from the French government arrived each month until Napoleon's exile.

Using Betsy Bonaparte's extensive letters, the author makes clear that the "belle of Baltimore" disdained America's obsession with moneymaking, its growing ethos of democracy, and its rigid gender roles that confined women to the parlor and the nursery; that she sought instead a European society where women created salons devoted to intellectual life--where she was embraced by many who took into their confidence, such as Madame de Staël, Madame Récamier, the aging Marquise de Villette (goddaughter of Voltaire), among others--and where aristocracy, based on birth and breeding rather than commerce, dominated society.

Wondrous Beauty is a riveting portrait of a woman torn between two worlds, unable to find peace in either--one a provincial, convention-bound new America; the other a sophisticated, extravagant Old World Europe that embraced freedoms, a Europe ultimately swallowed up by decadence and idleness.
A stunning revelation of an extraordinary age.
About the Author: Carol Berkin received her A.B. from Barnard College and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is Presidential Professor of History at Baruch College and a member of the history faculty of the Graduate Center of CUNY. Berkin is the author numerous book, among them Civil War Wives, Revolutionary Mothers, A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, and First Generations: Women in Colonial America, as well as articles and reviews. Professor Berkin has worked as a consultant on several PBS and History Channel documentaries and serves on the boards of The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and the National Council for History Education. She lives in New York City.