Meet the Basbanes: Author & Translator
Join us for an evening with Barbara Basbanes Richter in conversation with Nicholas A. Basbanes. Barbara Basbanes Richter is the translator of Mademoiselle de Malpeire, a 19th-century French novel by Fanny Reybaud, and Nicholas A. Basbanes is the author of Cross of Snow: A Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
ABOUT MADEMOISELLE DE MALPEIRE
Barbara Richter uses her considerable skills as a modern translator and writer to bring Fanny Reybaud's captivating French novel to the English-speaking world for the first time in more than a century. This 1854 novel focuses on a portrait of Mademoiselle de Malepeire, which hangs in Dom Gérusac's home in the countryside of southern France just before the first French Revolution. Noted for her beauty, Mademoiselle de Malepeire had been painted by her well-to-do suitor, who was enthralled with her beauty and able to disregard her cold and haughty demeanor. Her eventual love story is pieced together in Dom Gérusac's home as many unexpected guests join him, and Mademoiselle de Malepeire's dramatic new identity is revealed.
A fast-paced and delightful mystery, Reybaud's novel, in Richter's hands, is a clever, inspiring gem that can still pull at the hearts of 21st century people, and perhaps, in this newest translation, will revive interest in Reybaud, once a bestselling French female novelist and considered the equal of fellow female French novelist George Sand.
ABOUT CROSS OF SNOW
A major literary biography of America’s best-loved nineteenth-century poet, the first in more than fifty years, and a much-needed reassessment for the twenty-first century of a writer whose stature and celebrity were unparalleled in his time, whose work helped to explain America’s new world not only to Americans but to Europe and beyond. From the author of On Paper (“Buoyant”–The New Yorker; “Essential”–Publishers Weekly), Patience and Fortitude (“A wonderful hymn”–Simon Winchester), and A Gentle Madness (“A jewel”–David McCullough).
In Cross of Snow, the result of more than twelve years of research, including access to never-before-examined letters, diaries, journals, notes, Nicholas Basbanes reveals the life, the times, the work–the soul–of the man who shaped the literature of a new nation with his countless poems, sonnets, stories, essays, translations, and whose renown was so wide-reaching that his deep friendships included Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, and Oscar Wilde.