1994, Simon and Schuster

"Louise Colet (the model for Flaubert's Madame Bovary) lived a rich life with drama and excess. Francine du Plessix Gray provides an unexpectedly candid portrait of sexual mores in nineteenth-century France in Rage and Fire, an engrossing biography of the early feminist and flamboyant Romantic poet Colet."
-Vanity Fair

"Du Plessix Gray is an eminent novelist and essayist, and has used her talents to particularly good effect in her account of Colet's years after Flaubert's final rejection...a wonderful and compelling book, guaranteed to fascinate in every area of its many interests...the rightful unveiling of a remarkable woman hidden by history."
-Rachel Cusk in The Times

"Wonderfully capacious, stuffed with poignant vignettes of famous figures and tremendous historical events."
-Frances Spalding in the Sunday Times

"A spirited book that does more than lay out with great skill the flamboyant career and personal life of an extraordinary woman ."
-The New York Times Book Review

"Refreshing and incisive...the first proper scholarly biography to be written. Much has been said and written about Colet, from the contemporary Maxine du Camp onwards, has been woefully inaccurate and clearly unjust. Du Plessix Gray's excellent book does much to redress the balance."
-Susan Elkin in the Literary Review

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