Versailles
By Kathryn Davis
(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Hardcover, 9780618221363, 224pp.)
Publication Date: August 2002
Categories: Historical - General
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Versailles is the story of an expansive spirit locked in a pretty body and an impossible moment in history. As the novel begins, fourteen-year-old Marie Antoinette is traveling from Austria to France to meet her fiancé, the mild, abstracted Louis. He will become the sixteenth Louis to reign in France, and Antoinette will be his queen, hemmed in by towering hairdos, the xenophobic suspicion of her subjects, the misogyny of her detractors, the larger-than-life figures of Mirabeau, Du Barry, Robespierre, and the manifold twists and turns of the palace she calls home.
The novel moves from room to room, from garden to fountain, occasionally breaking into playlets in which we glimpse characters struggling to mind their step in the great ballroom of the world. Driving our tour is the relentless engine of time, that friend to youth, for whom anything is possible. Antoinette gives birth to four children, two of whom will outlive her; she falls in love; she dies at the guillotine. A meditation on time and the soul’s true journey within it, Versailles is at once wittily entertaining and astonishingly wise.
Kathryn Davis is the recipient of a Kafka Prize for fiction by an American woman and the 1999 Morton Dauwen Zabel Award, American Academy of Arts and Letters. Davis teaches at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York and lives with her husband and daughter in Vermont.
". . . [S]plendid . . . [VERSAILLES] is rapturous, like an aria. --Stacey D'Erasmo The New York Times Book Review
"Elegant . . . a persuasive and sympathetic portrait of Antoinette." --Katharine Weber The Los Angeles Times
"Davis has a poetic sensibility, a canny eye for details . . . Davis gives us . . . the stuff of true art." --David Guy The Washington Post
"Davis is so skilled at draping . . . gemlike images around her story . . ." --John Freeman Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"An elegant novel . . . the voice Davis has given [Antoinette] is by turns sage, mercurial, and ravishing." The New Yorker
A reflective, mysterious novel about human development.
The New York Times Book Review
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