Maroon cloth binding with gilt title on the spine.

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For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean original book from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG. 

A treasured copy of Jack’s mother, the power behind both her famous husband and Jack. She was a personal friend of Vita Sackville-West 

Written in 1959 this biography is still worth seeking out if you have an interest in Anne Marie Louise d’Orleans, Duchesse de Montpensier, otherwise known as La Grande Mademoiselle the revolutionary Princess at the court of Louis XIV (The Sun King). The biography is quite detailed and the author shows an in-depth understanding of France and the court during the Mademoiselle’s lifetime. Its packed with lots of interesting facts about both the subject and the period being written. During her period of exile at Chateau de St Fargeau we are shown clearly why she thought she was in the wilderness and how she did her best to make something positive out of what was seen as a living death by the court.

The end of the book has a number of appendices which deal specifically with The Baptism of Royal Children, the Designations Monsieu, Madame, Mademoiselle etc, Mademoiselle and the Bastille, St Fargeau, the Death of Anne of Austria etc. The only thing this book is lacking is a detailed bibliography of sources that you see in most modern biographies, but this aside this book is still one of the better biographies I have read on this interesting lady.

Victoria Mary, Lady Nicolson, CH (née Sackville-West; 9 March 1892 – 2 June 1962), usually known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author and garden designer. Sackville-West was a successful novelist, poet and journalist, as well as a prolific letter writer and diarist. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life. She was twice awarded the Hawthornden Prize for Imaginative Literature: in 1927 for her pastoral epic, The Land, and in 1933 for her Collected Poems. She was the inspiration for the protagonist of Orlando: A Biography, by her friend and lover Virginia Woolf. She wrote a column in The Observer from 1946 to 1961 and is remembered for the celebrated garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, created with her husband, Sir Harold Nicolson.