19th century
A01=Catherine Axelrad
Author_Catherine Axelrad
Category=FBA
Category=FYT
consent
entente cordiale
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_nobargain
French literature
Guernsey
historical novel
tuberculosis
upstairs downstairs
Victor Hugo
women's writing
Product details
- ISBN 9781739778378
- Dimensions: 120 x 180mm
- Publication Date: 18 Jul 2024
- Publisher: Les Fugitives
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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In the late 1850s, Celina, aged fifteen, born into poverty, takes up work as a chambermaid for the Victor Hugo family living in exile in Guernsey. There she encounters the delicate balance between the professional and the personal, and the obligations placed upon her as her livelihood is at stake.
Inspired by Hugo's cryptic diary notes and by letters from his wife, Catherine Axelrad restores to life the girl whose untimely death shook the Hugo family, capturing the changing time in which she lived as well as life in the Channel Islands. In doing so, Axelrad sheds light on the complexity of Hugo's private persona and cuts le grand homme down to size. Intimately involved with him, Celina remains at the margins of the poet's creative life; she recounts her relationship both with the artist who is writing his Miserables by day and with the man who joins her at night.
First published by Editions Gallimard in 1997, this novella offers a singular perspective on matters of sexual consent and class dynamics: one which makes us take stock of social progress, but also wonder how far we have really come today.
Born in 1956, Catherine Axelrad lives and works in Paris. She started
writing in the late 80s while working as a teacher. Apart from Celina, her published works include three autofiction novels (among which The Warszawianka, translated by Sacha Rabinovitch), a short biography of Moliere, a pastiche of Proust (Albertine travestie),
and a series of three YA novellas under the pseudonym Alice Chambard.
In 2011 she left teaching to study Protestant theology, and in 2014, she
became a minister of the Eglise protestante unie de France.
