Word: duchessed
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MARLBOROUGH'S DUCHESS (314 pp.)- Louis Kronenberger-Knopf...
Authors who "understand women" may do so because they have learned first to understand men-and to know what a woman must contend with in her particular time and society. Author Louis Kronenberger, TIME'S theater critic and an authority on 18th century Britain, knows that Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, was one of the toughest, tetchiest, worldliest women of her time-but also that the time itself was one of treachery and double-dealing, an age in which England was "almost plagued with brilliance, and swollen with ambition." It was the era of Swift, Defoe, Newton, Wren, Pope...
...only to find that he, too, had had his day. Just as the Queen would have no more of Sarah, so would the war-weary nation have no more of John. "Mr. & Mrs. Freeman" were no more: they had been reduced to the status of a common duke and duchess...
...Sarah's grandeur reached perfection in the years that followed her fall from favor. "That B.B.B.B. old B.* the Duchess of Marlbh" (as the architect of Blenheim Palace, Sir John Vanbrugh, described her) outlived not only her husband, but Anne, Anne's successor (George I) and most of her own children. Widowed at 62, she rejected offers of marriage from an earl and from the proud Duke of Somerset. Marlborough had loved her passionately (tradition has it that on coming home from the wars, he would "pleasure" her even before he had taken off his boots), and Sarah...
Modern Outlook. "Almost every anecdote concerning her is an encounter," says Author Kronenberger, and Marlbo-rough's Duchess is so rich in anecdotes that it becomes a series of unforgettable encounters. There are anecdotes in the grand manner-such as old Sarah marching into the law courts to forbid the sale of one of the Duke's presentation swords, crying: "Shall I suffer the sword which my lord would have carried to the gates of Paris to be sent to the pawnbroker's and have the diamonds picked out one by one?" There are anecdotes...