Lovers and tyrants

by Francine du Plessix Gray

Lovers and Tyrants is an erotic, urgent and enormously funny novel in the historical tradition of those writers whose art has radically expanded women's consciousness - Virginia Woolf, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy, Doris Lessing. Francine Gray delivers us from many traditional literary inhibitions and opens a startling new perspective into the inner lives of women. The history of Stephanie-the woman whose life is chronicled-follows her from her extraordinary childhood in France through her father's mysterious disappearance, her emigration to America, her picaresque schooling in New York, her tempestuous sexual relationship with a melodramatic, tragicomic European Nobleman. She goes on to engage herself in the major conflicts of modern times-marriage, politics, feminism, religious quests. Every phase of Stephanie's life illustrates our painful ambivalence toward the irreconcilable poles of love and liberation, security and freedom. "The most tyrannical despots can be the o