The Portrait of Zélide

by Geoffrey Scott

This slim book is a revelation of psychological acuity, the soul of the biographer's art. In 1925, Scott, an English man of letters, one-time librarian and secretary to Bernard Berenson and author of The Architecture of Humanism, published this biography of Isabelle de Charriere, who wrote using the pen name Zélide. Born Isabella van Serooskerken van Tuyll in 1740, the Dutch girl earned early recognition around Europe for her precocious intellect. She had a dozen or so suitors, including the impossibly egotistical Boswell, but her uncompromising, somewhat perverse devotion to ratiocination led her to marry her brothers' lackluster tutor. Her most renowned relationship, however, took place some 15 years later, when she met Benjamin Constant, a man 27 years her junior. That eight-year relationship informs the bulk of the book and for Scott, the story of Zélide and Benjamin and Madame de Stael, the woman he left her for, is nothing less than Europe's renunciation of reason and the Enlightenment for sensibility and Romanticism.

Genres: Biography, Feminism

216 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1925

About the author

There is more than one author with this name.

Geoffrey^Scott

Reviews

[Rita]

Nelleke Noordervliet recommended this book.
as a biography of Belle van Zuiden.

Surprisingly, it was published in 1925.
Just today I noticed a Dutch biography of her just out, in Leiden newspaper... Don't know what other biographies of her are out there.

"This slim book is a revelation of psychological acuity, the soul of the biographer's art. In 1925, Scott, an English man of letters, one-time librarian and secretary to Bernard Berenson and author of The Architecture of Humanism, published this biography of Isabelle de Charriere, who wrote using the pen name Zélide. Born Isabella van Serooskerken van Tuyll in 1740, the Dutch girl earned early recognition around Europe for her precocious intellect. She had a dozen or so suitors, including the impossibly egotistical Boswell, but her uncompromising, somewhat perverse devotion to ratiocination led her to marry her brothers' lackluster tutor. Her most renowned relationship, however, took place some 15 years later, when she met Benjamin Constant, a man 27 years her junior. That eight-year relationship informs the bulk of the book and for Scott, the story of Zélide and Benjamin and Madame de Stael, the woman he left her for, is nothing less than Europe's renunciation of reason and the Enlightenment for sensibility and Romanticism."

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Portrait of Zelide is like having a backside seat to the French Revolution, a Dutch woman who should have been a scientist, disciplined, hard-working, animated, not really wanting children but a pure intellectual life, an insider among the intelligentsia of the era such as Voltaire and Goethe. She married a math tutor who was felt to be beneath her, but only started writing novels relatively late in life in lonely Swiss relative isolation in her husband's house. The love of her life, kindred spirit in letters anyway, Benjamin, who had a foot-loose and vagabond youth went on to write the French Constitution under Napoleon's return, and took up with an influential actress and personality who had somehow avoided the guillotine, on a chance stagecoach meeting. Scott brings events and insights alive, making the reader want next to read Zelide's (Isabelle de Charriere) novels.

[Betty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Scott's writing is luminous, while his subject seems barely worthy of his talents. He gleans from letters and diaries a lucid analysis of Zelide and her contradictory nature, at once passionate and cold. A sample passage to show the glorious language:

For it had dawned on Monsieur de Charriere's mind that his wife needed a change. Decidedly after fourteen years a real change was indicated: fourteen years since the oak gate of Colombier had first clanged behind Zelide; fourteen times the lime tree in the court had shed its leaves, and still Mademoiselle Louise purred and Mademoiselle Henriette's narrow eyes watched, and Monsieur de Charriere sat between his sisters with folded hands. Her health was worse. (p. 94)