Love Among The Butterflies: The Secret Life Of A Victorian Lady
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Few lives have been as vividly and secretly documented as that of Margaret Fountaine, a Victorian gentlewoman who broke every convention of her era to roam the wild corners of the world in pursuit of exotic butterflies — and passionate love. Love Among the Butterflies: The Secret Life of a Victorian Lady presents the extraordinary diaries of Fountaine, a woman who, from the 1870s onward, chronicled decades of adventure across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, all while conducting a lengthy, unconventional romance with a Syrian dragoman named Khalil Neimy. Her journals, sealed for 100 years and opened in 1978 as she had instructed, detail the inner life of a woman who was at once a rigorous natural scientist and a deeply passionate romantic, defying the rigid expectations of Victorian womanhood at every turn. Edited with care and intelligence, this volume illustrates how a single life can overturn all assumptions about the prim and repressed Victorian age, revealing instead a world of breathtaking personal freedom hard-won by sheer force of will. Fountaine's prose is vivid, candid, and often wickedly self-aware, offering an intimate portrait that reads as both personal confession and travel epic. Her story stands as a landmark in the literature of women's lives, a testament to the power of obsession — whether for a rare specimen pinned in a net or a love that defied an entire society. What other secrets did she leave behind, still waiting to be discovered?
Author: Margaret Fountaine
Format: Hardback
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
Few lives have been as vividly and secretly documented as that of Margaret Fountaine, a Victorian gentlewoman who broke every convention of her era to roam the wild corners of the world in pursuit of exotic butterflies — and passionate love. Love Among the Butterflies: The Secret Life of a Victorian Lady presents the extraordinary diaries of Fountaine, a woman who, from the 1870s onward, chronicled decades of adventure across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas, all while conducting a lengthy, unconventional romance with a Syrian dragoman named Khalil Neimy. Her journals, sealed for 100 years and opened in 1978 as she had instructed, detail the inner life of a woman who was at once a rigorous natural scientist and a deeply passionate romantic, defying the rigid expectations of Victorian womanhood at every turn. Edited with care and intelligence, this volume illustrates how a single life can overturn all assumptions about the prim and repressed Victorian age, revealing instead a world of breathtaking personal freedom hard-won by sheer force of will. Fountaine's prose is vivid, candid, and often wickedly self-aware, offering an intimate portrait that reads as both personal confession and travel epic. Her story stands as a landmark in the literature of women's lives, a testament to the power of obsession — whether for a rare specimen pinned in a net or a love that defied an entire society. What other secrets did she leave behind, still waiting to be discovered?