Rounding, Virginia 1956-

views updated

ROUNDING, Virginia 1956-

PERSONAL:

Born October 10, 1956, in St. Albans, England; daughter of Maurice and Patricia Ethel (Griffin) Rounding. Education: University of London, B.A. (with honors; Russian language and literature), 1978.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Flat 6, 13-17 Long Ln., London EC1A 9PN, England. E-mail—Virginia.Rounding@btinternet.com.

CAREER:

Consort of Musicke, London, England, administrator, treasurer, 1986-93; Tavistock Institute, London, administrator, 1994-95; Microsoft, editor for software packages Money and Encarta; Priory Church of St. Bartholomew the Great, London, part-time director of development.

WRITINGS:

Awaiting an Epiphany (poetry), Priory Church of St. Bartholomew the Great (London, England), 1997.

Ironing the Hankies (poetry), Pikestaff Press (Sidmouth, England), 1999.

Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century Courtesans, Bloomsbury Press (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor of poetry to literary magazines, including Acumen, Cencrastus, Envoi, Frogmore Papers, Orbis, Poetry Nottingham International, Resurgence, and Staple. Contributor of translations of poetry of Arseny Tarkovsky to periodicals, including Chapman, Modern Poetry in Translation, Rialto, Sphinx, and Stone Soup. Collection of translations of Tarkovsky's poems, titled Life, Life, published by Crescent Moon.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

A biography of Catherine the Great.

SIDELIGHTS:

In addition to writing her own poetry and translating the works of Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky, Virginia Rounding is the author of Grandes Horizontales: The Lives and Legends of Four Nineteenth-Century Courtesans. Published in 2003, the text includes the biography of the legendary English courtesan Cora Pearl, along with those of three other courtesans: Marie Duplessis, a Frenchwoman who died of consumption at age twenty-three and on whom Alexandré Dumas fíls based his novel La dame aux Camélias—the basis for Verdi's opera La Traviata; Apollonie Sabatier, the French courtesan whose voluptuous body was used as the model for Auguste Clesinger's sculpture La femme piquée par un serpent; and the exorbitantly wealthy Russian-Jewish courtesan known as La Païva, whose mansion on the Champs Elysées is now a highlight of a Paris visitor's tour.

Pearl, born Emma Crouch, counted among her admirers the duke de Morny and Prince Napoleon, a cousin of the great emperor. Pearl was the only one of the four women to write her memoirs. Legend has it that she once served herself up on a silver platter at a dinner party, wearing only a sprinkling of parsley.

The others also changed their names—Duplessis was born Alphonsine Plessis; Sabatier was born Aglaé-Joséphine Savatier, a name taken from savate, meaning "old, used slipper" (her nickname later became La Présidente); and La Païva was born Therese Lachmann.

The important businessmen, politicians, and artists who cherished these women supported them and revered them as their muses. The poet Baudelaire wrote love letters and poetry for Madame Sabatier, and arts patron Alfred Mosselman sponsored her literary salon, which attracted the likes of Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Gustav Flaubert. La Païva's salon was equally notable, and so great was the devotion of her husband, Count Henckel von Donnersmark, that after her death he kept her body in a large container of embalming fluid, before which he would mourn.

According to a reviewer in the Economist, loss of virginity other than through marriage—whether caused by rape, abuse, or promiscuity—marked nineteenth-century women as unmarriageable, leaving them only two main routes to follow: a humble occupation such as governess or a life in the "demimonde," or half world between high society and common prostitution, where the right women could earn a magnificent living. Rounding writes about the efforts of the British and French governments to study these women and to determine whether prostitutes were "born" or "made."

Daphne Merkin, in the New York Times Book Review, noted that "a good deal of what [Rounding] … recounts has the flavor of myth or inspired guesswork, which gives the book a slightly hazy, impressionistic quality rather than the feel of factually moored social history." Yet, Merkin called the book "fascinating on several counts" and pointed out that it proves that "the secrets of the harem, predicated on massaging egos as well as flesh, have changed little over the centuries."

Frances Wilson, in the Guardian, wrote, "Rounding breaks new ground; Grandes Horizontales is a historically precise, coolly analytical study of the rise and fall of second-empire Paris, a regime that is treated as inseparable from the dangerous opulence of the demimonde.… Rounding shapes her narrative so that each life weaves into the next, as lovers are shared and others' legends are consumed. This is a rich, timely, engrossing book that puts its forerunners to shame."

Marie Marmo Mullaney, in a review for Library Journal, observed that Rounding shows how the lives of the four courtesans both differed from and resembled those of common prostitutes of the day. She called Grandes Horizontales "a fascinating complement" to other recent books on the subject. Michele Roberts, in a review for the New Statesman, wrote that "Rounding makes a good, valiant case for these women as interesting subjects in their own right, each one with her own version of courage and cupidity, generosity and financial savvy, intelligence and naivety" and that she also "gives us a particularly lively picture of the gung-ho, swaggering bachelor milieu of the dandies, novelists and diarists" who visited the demimonde salons. A Publishers Weekly contributor concluded that students of women's studies and French cultural history "will be gratified by this judicious account." A contributor to Kirkus Reviews lamented the lack of illustrations and the abundance of long quotations, but called the book "a scholarly but generally readable tour through some sexy and salacious byways in the social landscape of nineteenth-century France."

Writing about Grandes Horizontales on her home page, Rounding said the book is about "the lives of four courtesans but also about the legends surrounding them." She said, "I have attempted to distinguish each life from the legend, while being aware that … to strip away the legend completely may be to leave little of the life."