Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse, a Tiger among the Bluestockings

Anne-Marie Fauques de Vaucluse fled from France to England in 1756 to avoid being sent to the Bastille for writing a book denouncing the tyranny of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. When the book was printed the French government tried to get it suppressed and the author arrested, but failed. Author of twenty books in both French and English, she was an eccentric, brilliant, and wayward woman who escaped from a convent in her youth and had numerous love-affairs, some disastrous. Novelist, political satirist, poet, feminist and animal rights advocate, she was determined to play a role in the Enlightenment intellectual scene and succeeded despite all the odds. Fauques was at one time the mistress of the Young Pretender and was a friend of some of the most scandal-prone figures of the time, including John Cleland, Elizabeth Craven and William Beckford. This biography unravels the confusion surrounding the identity of a woman who was an astonishingly versatile genius. The cover picture shows the Fountain of Vaucluse, painting by Thomas Cole 1841.