[In the following positive review, Meister compliments Gray's portrayal of Colet in Rage and Fire.]

The would-be biographer of Louise Colet faces a dilemma: Colet herself wanted and expected her contemporaries—and posterity—to judge her solely on the basis of her literary output; she resented innuendos suggesting that she traded on her beauty and sexuality to further her literary career and, even when in real financial need, refused any stipend she suspected of not being predicated on her merits as an author. The last thing she would have expected from the future was to be remembered as a mere appendage—and a negative one at that—to the life of another writer. But in study after study she is discussed as no more than an addendum to the central subject, her long-term lover Gustave Flaubert. This is especially ironic since it was supposed that Colet, already a famous writer when their liaison began, would aid and abet Flaubert on his climb to fame.

The difficult truth is that a rereading of Colet's considerable creative legacy does not prove her testiest critics wrong. Her poetry, for which she received the Académie française's coveted prize an unprecedented four times, has no real place in the canon of Romantic verse, despite the youthful charm of some of the poems of her first collection, Fleurs du midi (1836). Lui (1859) and Une histoire du soldat (1856), her two romans-à-clef, which increased her notoriety and brought her modest financial success, are interesting today only to those curious about the literary celebrities they portray (principally George Sand, Alfred de Musset, Flaubert, and Louise herself). Her anticlerical polemics (Les Derniers Abbés [1868] and large parts of L'Italie des Italiens [1865] among others) demonstrate the worst fault of most agitprop: an almost hysterical partisanship that detracts from the reasonable arguments they espouse. Even her impassioned manifestos in defense of republican ideals, whether fought for in Poland, Italy, or France itself and certainly attractive in their ideology, suffer from her often careless and over-wrought style, as do her equally heartfelt condemnations—expressed in poetry, essays, and prose fiction—of the misogynist attitudes so prevalent in 19th-century Europe.

What then tempts a contemporary American author, especially one with the renown of Francine du Plessix Gray, to expend her time, energy, and skills on this first major English-language biography of Colet? To this reviewer, who has long been as fascinated by the beautiful and feisty Colet as is the author of Rage and Fire, the answer is simple: with her courage, her independence, her intelligence, her insistence on her right to sexual fulfillment, her struggle against a male-dominated and predominantly misogynist society, Colet stands out as a woman of valor and value, a complex woman of many faults and many virtues, worthy of study today not because of what she wrote but because of who she was.

Gray captures and portrays Colet's character extremely well in Rage and Fire. Without glossing over the writer's temper, her impetuosity, or her tangled and often overlapping love affairs, Gray conveys her sympathy for this hard-working woman who was determined to write her way to financial independence without compromising her beliefs.

Along the way, Gray fills in the cultural and historical backdrop of Colet's life (1810–76), skillfully identifying writers, critics, and political figures less familiar to contemporary American readers than they would be to their French counterparts. She also gives some telling quotations from well-known women-haters of the day, perhaps unfairly neglecting to counterbalance them with opposing statements but allowing us to feel how Colet must have reacted to them, especially since so many were directed against her personally.

My only small objection to this thoroughly researched and documented study involves the two “opening images” that make up the prologue. The first of these depicts a violent quarrel between Colet and Flaubert during which he envisions himself striking her with a burning log snatched from the fire and “setting fire to her golden hair and azure dress.” The second shows Flaubert, three years after Colet's death, tearfully destroying the relics of their affair while his protégé Guy de Maupassant looks on. Ms. Gray offers some documentary evidence for these lurid dramatizations, but with so much unassailable evidence, why “image” anything in a serious biography? Perhaps Gray, as rightly renowned for her novels as for her studies, could not resist using her fictive flair to lure the reader into the excellent study that follows. To this reader, however, the life of Louise Colet was dramatic—or even melodramatic—enough just as it stands.