The wonderfully talented author Francine du Plessix Gray’s new novel, The Queen’s Lover, has just arrived on bookshelves everywhere, and we haven’t been able to put it down. “Francine du Plessix Gray’s The Queen’s Lover portrays a wizened and seriously depressed Marie-Antoinette in the years before her death. Told from the perspective of her lover and lifelong friend, the Swedish aristocrat Axel von Fersen, the story introduces us to a queen whose “aura of warmth and gentleness” and “infinite grace” inspired devotion in her real-life subjects. As the rage of the country’s impoverished citizenry increases and anti-royalist sentiments escalate, Fersen takes immense personal risks to bring the royal family—including King Louis XVI—to safety. We all know the tragic results of these escape attempts, but du Plessix Gray pulls the curtain back to reveal the inner life of a queen who was a concerned friend and lover, a deeply protective mother and—saddest of all—a woman who knew much too early that her fate was out of her hands.”
Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer and literary critic Francine du Plessix Gray was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1930 where her father, Vicomte Bertrand Jochaud du Plessix, was a French diplomat. She spent her early years in Paris, where a milieu of mixed cultures and a multilingual family (French father and Russian mother) influenced her. She grew up in New York City, where she was a scholarship student at Spence School. She later attended Bryn Mawr College for two years, and earned her B.A. in philosophy at Barnard College in 1952. She had two sons with her late husband, painter Cleve Gray.
