Product Description

The scintillating life of the most brilliant woman of the French Enlightenment, the lover of Voltaire and translator of Newton

Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil was born to the highest circles of the French aristocracy, married a marquis at the age of eighteen, and indulged in all the pleasures of her class. Then at twenty-seven, defying convention, she became the mistress of poet and playwright Voltaire, embarking on an extraordinary and transformative intellectual journey as his patroness, his lover, and his companion. In this sparkling life, Judith P. Zinsser vividly explores how the Marquise Du Châtelet transformed herself from courtier, wife, and mother into one of the leading intellects of the French Enlightenment.

Freed by her wealth and status to pursue a life of the mind, Du Châtelet developed swiftly into an accomplished mathematician, physicist, translator, and author of original works of philosophy and science. At the end of her life, pregnant by a young new lover, she raced to complete her translation and commentary on Newton’s Principia. The only woman of the Enlightenment to be recognized for her genius, Du Châtelet was centuries ahead of her time. By bringing this singular woman to life with style and wit, Zinsser at last gives this revolutionary her due.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #756489 in Books
• Published on: 2006-11-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 400 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The 300th birthday of the 18th-century French noblewoman, scientist, freethinker (she considered Jesus "a pious fraud") and paramour of Voltaire brings the second new biography. David Bodanis's Passionate Minds presents her life essentially as a romance novel. Historian Zinsser (A History of Their Own) says more about her subject's scientific work, which groped toward a modern conception of kinetic energy and included an influential recasting of Newton's work on the calculus. Du Châtelet (1706-1749) was certainly an emblematic, if not quite pivotal, figure in the ferment of 18th-century European science and philosophy, and her works could ground an illuminating and accessible intellectual history of the age, but they demand a more systematic treatment than Zinsser gives them. She has a surer footing on social and cultural history, as she surveys the ancien régime's caste system and court protocol at Versailles and regales readers with details of du Châtelet's luxurious wardrobe and household furnishings, as well as her struggle for acceptance by the male scientific establishment. All this makes for an enjoyable study of an unusual woman and feminist pioneer, but du Châtelet still awaits a biography that does full justice to her ideas. Photos. (Dec. 4)
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From Booklist
Born in 1706 to a well-connected French family, Emilie du Chatelet lived a life of varied and sometimes contradictory roles. In the more conventional role, she had a successful pragmatic marriage; bore several children: worked tirelessly to advance her family; loved fine things; and was frequently among the party-loving courtiers at Versailles. In the less conventional role, she became the mistress of Voltaire (itself a full-time job) and, partly to keep him out of trouble, retired with him from society and devoted herself to intellectual pursuits. A brilliant thinker, she mastered advanced mathematics, conducted scientific experiments, wrote a textbook on physics, and completed the first French translation of Newton's Principia Mathematica, adding her own commentary. She died in her 40s, shortly after giving birth, the result of an affair with a new, much younger lover. Zinsser's biography will be appreciated by serious readers interested in the history of science during the Enlightenment and in the lives of women who defied contemporary expectations about what their proper role should be. Mary Ellen Quinn
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Judith P. Zinsser is the coauthor of the landmark two-volume history of European women, A History of Their Own. She teaches at Miami University in Ohio.