The Princess of Albemarle: Amélie Rives, Author and Celebrity at the Fin De Siècle

George Mason University historian Censer (The Reconstruction of White Southern Womanhood) delivers an incisive scholarly biography of novelist and playwright Amélie Rives. Born in 1863 to a well-to-do family in Richmond, Va., Rives believed that her God-given talent for writing would lead to “accomplishment and acclaim.” In 1888, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine published “The Quick or the Dead?,” a courtship story whose “gothic overtones” and “allusions to emotion and sexuality,” coupled with Rives’s youth and beauty, launched her to fame. Marriage to a wealthy descendant of John Jacob Astor quickly followed, but family tensions and Rives’s persistent illnesses—and addiction to cocaine and morphine—contributed to their divorce. In 1895, she married Russian painter Pierre Troubetzkoy, the son of an exiled Russian prince, and went on to publish numerous short stories, novels, poems, and Broadway plays. After Troubetzkoy died in 1936, Rives fell into despondency and destroyed many of her personal papers, leaving behind mostly manuscripts of her published work. Though the long plot synopses grow tedious, Censer does an admirable job piecing together Rives’s life (including an extended stay in fin-de-siècle Paris) and sheds light on the rise of American celebrity culture. This solid account rescues a remarkable woman from obscurity. (Mar.)