La Belle Créole: The Cuban Countess Who Captivated Havana, Madrid, and Paris

Just as Cuba’s earliest female author, María de las Mercedes de Santa Cruz y Montalvo (often called La Belle Créole), enchanted 19th-century Europeans with lush descriptions of her homeland, García-Lapuerta captures the reader’s imagination with vivid details of Mercedes’s life in Cuba, Madrid, and Paris. Drawing on Mercedes’s memoirs, along with contemporary letters and accounts, García-Lapuerta depicts the vivacious and daring Mercedes as an influential figure in aristocratic circles on both sides of the Atlantic. The biography begins with Mercedes’s early years, which she spent with her great-grandmother while her parents traveled the globe. Shortly after her father returned, Mercedes was whisked away to foreign lands, where she remained for a significant portion of her life—first Spain and then, as political tensions and her husband’s position in Napoleon’s defeated army dictated, France. In Paris, Mercedes grew into an accomplished society woman, hosting salons that attracted famous musicians, writers, and other members of high society. She won acclaim as an amateur soprano before turning to writing, the talent that cemented her legacy in Latin American history. García-Lapuerta’s beautifully written account of La Belle Créole illuminates lesser-known aspects of 19th-century transatlantic culture and the roles powerful women were able to play in it. (Sept.)