Purple Passage : The Life of Mrs Frank Leslie

by Madeleine B. Stern

Book by Stern, Madeleine B.

281 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1953

About the author

Madeleine Bettina Stern was an independent scholar and rare book dealer. She graduated from Barnard College in 1932 with a B.A. in English literature. She received her M.A. in English literature from Columbia University in 1934. Stern was particularly known for her work on the writer Louisa May Alcott. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943 to write a biography of Alcott, which was eventually published in 1950. In 1945, she and her friend Leona Rostenberg opened Rostenberg & Stern Books. Rostenberg and Stern were active members of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America, at a time when few women were members. The pair lived and worked in Rostenberg's house in the Bronx. They were known for creating unique rare book catalogs. In 1960, Stern helped found the New York Antiquarian Book Fair.
Stern and Leona Rostenberg became widely known in the late 1990s while in their late eighties when their memoir on the rare book trade, Old Books, Rare Friends, became a best seller.

Reviews

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now almost forgotten, in 1890 Mrs. Frank Leslie was a writer and lecturer better known than any other woman in America. Miriam Florence Follin-Peacock-Squier-Leslie-Wilde, Baroness de Bazus, was a major power in the publishing world when women of her class did not run companies with several hundred employees. Under her leadership Frank Leslie's Popular Monthly became the leading magazine in the country after her third husband's death. Her fourth husband was Willie Wilde, Oscar's brother.

Don't bother with Madeleine Stern's other book on Mrs. Frank Leslie, Queen of Publishers' Row. It is a totally butchered excerpt from Purple Passage that was marketed to libraries for the YA market. It is not easier to read; it's actually more difficult because it was made shorter by chopping out chunks of text, apparently at random.

[Rhonda · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining true-life story of a fascinating woman in American history. I stumbled across this biography of Mrs. Leslie Frank while studying one of her ex-husbands, E.G. Squier. Wow - her life was an amazing story from youth to death. The narrative slowed between her third and fourth husbands, but perhaps only in comparison to her previous years. If you need an example of someone who has the ability to reinvent herself, this is it.