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Summary
Summary
A year in Paris . . . since World War II, countless American students have been lured by that vision--and been transformed by their sojourn in the City of Light. Dreaming in French tells three stories of that experience, and how it changed the lives of three extraordinary American women.
All three women would go on to become icons, key figures in American cultural, intellectual, and political life, but when they embarked for France, they were young, little-known, uncertain about their future, and drawn to the culture, sophistication, and drama that only Paris could offer. Yet their backgrounds and their dreams couldn't have been more different. Jacqueline Bouvier was a twenty-year-old debutante, a Catholic girl from a wealthy East Coast family. Susan Sontag was twenty-four, a precocious Jewish intellectual from a North Hollywood family of modest means, and Paris was a refuge from motherhood, a failing marriage, and graduate work in philosophy at Oxford. Angela Davis, a French major at Brandeis from a prominent African American family in Birmingham, Alabama, found herself the only black student in her year abroad program--in a summer when all the news from Birmingham was of unprecedented racial violence.
Kaplan takes readers into the lives, hopes, and ambitions of these young women, tracing their paths to Paris and tracking the discoveries, intellectual adventures, friendships, and loves that they found there. For all three women, France was far from a passing fancy; rather, Kaplan shows, the year abroad continued to influence them, a significant part of their intellectual and cultural makeup, for the rest of their lives. Jackie Kennedy carried her love of France to the White House and to her later career as a book editor, bringing her cultural and linguistic fluency to everything from art and diplomacy to fashion and historic restoration--to the extent that many, including Jackie herself, worried that she might seem "too French." Sontag found in France a model for the life of the mind that she was determined to lead; the intellectual world she observed from afar during that first year in Paris inspired her most important work and remained a key influence--to be grappled with, explored, and transcended--the rest of her life. Davis, meanwhile, found that her Parisian vantage strengthened her sense of political exile from racism at home and brought a sense of solidarity with Algerian independence. For her, Paris was a city of political commitment, activism, and militancy, qualities that would deeply inform her own revolutionary agenda and soon make her a hero to the French writers she had once studied.
Kaplan, whose own junior year abroad played a prominent role in her classic memoir, French Lessons , spins these three quite different stories into one evocative biography, brimming with the ferment and yearnings of youth and shot through with the knowledge of how a single year--and a magical city--can change a whole life. No one who has ever dreamed of Paris should miss it.
Author Notes
Alice Kaplan is the author of French Lessons: A Memoir , The Collaborator, and The Interpreter , and the translator of OK, Joe . Her books have been twice nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Awards, once for the National Book Award, and she is a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She holds the John M. Musser chair in French literature at Yale.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
This is an enduring group profile of three influential yet completely different American women, for each of whom Paris played a short but transformative role, over three tumultuous decades. Jacqueline Bouvier-who would become Vogue's It Girl and then, in Kaplan's words, "the eternal First Lady"-found in 1949 Paris the aesthetics, pleasures, and discipline that would serve her all her life. In 1957, Susan Sontag hit the Parisian ground running from her husband and five-year-old son in America to imbibe the freedoms of Europe. On hand during the breakdown of the old colonial dispensation, Sontag would even be buried in Paris. Angela Davis, like Miss Bouvier, traveled with a student group. In a French resort shortly before reaching Paris, on a late-summer day in 1963, she learned of the Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala., her hometown. Her ever-increasing radicalization back in the U.S. was applauded by myriad French intellectuals. The much-admired Kaplan (French Lessons: A Memoir) focuses sharply on three women of successive generations, providing a keen feminist-cultural picture of Paris's enduring, if varied, impact. 27 b&w photos. Agent: Marly Rusoff Agency. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Kaplan (The Interpreter, 2005) recounted her revelatory passion for all things French in French Lessons (1994). She now offers uniquely discerning portraits of three very different yet equally trailblazing American women whose lives were transformed by a year in France, and who, in turn, transformed the United States. An elegant, socially well-connected book lover and keen observer of beauty, Jackie Bouvier Kennedy was a Vassar student when she went to France in 1949 and found her true home. As Kaplan follows Kennedy to the White House and beyond, she praises her quiet power and uncanny intelligence while tracking her lifelong fascination with French art and culture. Leaving her husband and young son behind, Susan Sontag landed in France in 1958 and immersed herself in bohemian Paris and the French literary works that became the foundation for her influential, often controversial writing. Angela Davis' ardor for French propelled her out of segregated Birmingham, Alabama, to school in New York, then to Paris in 1963-64 as the only African American student in her year-abroad program. A woman of intellectual intensity and valor, she became a besieged activist and cause celebre. Kaplan's avidly researched, fresh, and astute biographical triptych reveals as much about the evolution of women's lives as it does about how profoundly these three exceptional Francophiles deepened the American experience.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
Choice Review
Kaplan (French, Yale) chronicled her own study-abroad experience in French Lessons: A Memoir (1993). Now, she turns her attention to the transformative Parisian experiences of three strikingly different young women: Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis. Age 20 when she embarked for France in 1949, Bouvier was a French major from Vassar, lived with a genteel family whose daughter became a close friend, and had access to what she called a "swanky" social life. In 1957, Sontag, 24, left her husband and young son, seeking liberation in "all the myths of Europe." She methodically taught herself French and dived passionately into French cultural life. Davis, a Brandeis University French major with strong interests in philosophy, studied in Paris in 1963-64, observing with alarm growing racial unrest in the US. Kaplan strains at times in her comparisons of the three women's experiences, but she argues convincingly about the impact of Paris on the rest of their lives: Bouvier's, aesthetic; Sontag's, intellectual; and Davis's, political. The biographical sketches offer rich context and sensitive insights both about the women's lives and the changing worlds they inhabited in Paris and the US. Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. L. Simon Skidmore College
Guardian Review
In this engaging and original work of biography and cultural history, Alice Kaplan shows how a year in Paris transformed the lives of three American women: "a Catholic debutante, a Jewish intellectual, an African American revolutionary". Paris was still haunted by the war when Jacqueline Bouvier lived there in 1949-50. Despite rationing, basic toilet facilities and just one bath a week, she remembered it as "the happiest year of my life". In 1957-58, Susan Sontag experienced a very different city. For her Paris was an escape from married life, a chance to explore her inner self and discover "a zone of intense sexual freedom". Hers was a city of cafes, expatriate Beats and cinemas where she learned "how to walk, to smoke, to kiss, to fight, to grieve". Paris was liberating, too, for Angela Davis (there 1963-64) who came from segregated Alabama. She "found a way to be free by speaking French". Back in America she became an icon of freedom for French intellectuals, 60,000 of whom marched through Paris to demand her release from prison in 1971. - PD Smith In this engaging and original work of biography and cultural history, Alice Kaplan shows how a year in Paris transformed the lives of three American women: "a Catholic debutante, a Jewish intellectual, an African American revolutionary". Paris was still haunted by the war when Jacqueline Bouvier lived there in 1949-50. - PD Smith.
Library Journal Review
Each of the women profiled in this book spent time abroad in France, and Kaplan (John M. Musser Professor of French, Yale; French Lessons: A Memoir) aims to demonstrate the reciprocal effects that student and place can have on each other. Although she never specifically explains why she chose to write about these particular women, she notes that each of their experiences helps to illuminate a moment in French or U.S. history: Jacqueline Bouvier's junior year (1949-50) at Vassar took her on one of the first post-World War II student-abroad programs; Susan Sontag arrived in Paris in the late 1950s for postgraduate work as France grappled with the Algerian independence movement; Angela Davis was the sole black student in her study-abroad cohort in the early 1960s, while the U.S. civil rights movement gained momentum. Kaplan follows each section covering one woman's French year with a chapter titled "The Return," describing the long-term impact that French culture had on the woman in question. She relies as much as possible on the women's own words to detail their experiences, filling in with compatriot students' diaries, letters, and interviews as necessary. VERDICT Sure to be popular with both academic and leisure readers. Recommended for its interesting perspective on three important women.-Heidi Senior, Univ. of Portland Lib., OR (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| l Jacqueline Bouvier: 1949-1950 | p. 7 |
| 2 Jacqueline Bouvier: The Return | p. 47 |
| 3 Susan Sontag: 1957-1958 | p. 81 |
| 4 Susan Sontag: The Return | p. 113 |
| 5 Angela Davis: 1963-1964 | p. 143 |
| 6 Angela Davis: The Return | p. 177 |
| Conclusion | p. 223 |
| A Note on Sources | p. 229 |
| Notes | p. 237 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 267 |
| Index | p. 271 |
