Paris Requiem (48 page)

Paris Requiem
is in certain respects the fictional partner of
Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind-Doctors from 1800.
It comes out of the same historical research, but focuses in particular on the belle époque, an energetic period for psychological and neurological thinking. Charcot and some of his more far-fetched followers at the Salpêtrière, Janet, the various schools of hypnotism and the patients they treated all helped to shape this novel.

The belle époque is a period I have been in love with ever since my PhD research led me to Marcel Proust. Of particular use in creating the world of
Paris Requiem
were a host of newspapers, sometimes lurid and frighteningly partisan in their accounts of everything from crime and vice to the Dreyfus case and the situation of the Jews. Many books also fed into the brew. To name just a few: Michel Drouin,
L’Affaire Dreyfus de A à Z (Flammarion, Paris, 1994);
Georges-André Euloge,
Histoire de la police et de la gendarmerie
(Plon, Paris, 1985); Michael Graetz,
The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France
(Stanford Univeristy Press, Stanford 1996); Ian Hacking’s
Mad Travellers
(University Press of Virginia, 1998) and Frederick Brown’s monumental
Zola: A Life
(Farrar, Straus, New York, 1995) My lifelong fascination with the James family, in particular Henry, William and Alice, and their extraordinary writing, has also played its part in the making of
Paris Requiem
, with its own particular family romance and trans-Atlantic tensions.

As ever, I am grateful to my own always stimulating family, John, Josh and Katrina, and now also their partners who bring a cornucopia of relations into my life; to Gary Pulsifer and my publishers; and to my agent Clare Alexander. Paris

LISA  APPIGNANESI
is the author of the prize-winning
Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors; All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion and Trials of Passion: Crimes in the Name of Love and Madness
(all Virago). Her novels include
The Memory Man
(Arcadia) and the best-selling psychological thrillers,
The Dead of Winter
and
Sanctuary
. She has also written the critically acclaimed memoir,
Losing the Dead
. She was President of English PEN, and is Chair of the Freud Museum, London, and Visiting Professor in Literature and the Medical Humanities at King’s College London. In 2013, she was awarded an OBE for her services to literature.

OTHER BOOKS BY LISA APPIGNANESI

Novels

The Memory Man

Sanctuary

The Dead of Winter

The Things We Do for Love

A Good Woman

Dreams of Innocence

Memory and Desire

Non-Fiction

All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion

Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind

Doctors from 1800

Freud’s Women (with John Forrester)

Losing the Dead

Simone de Beauvoir

The Cabaret

Femininity and the Creative Imagination:

Proust, James and Musil

Edited Volumes

Fifty Shades of Feminism

(with Rachel Holmes & Susie Orbach)

Free Expression is No Offence

The Rushdie File (with Sarah Maitland)

Dismantling Truth (with Hilary Lawson)

Postmodernism

Ideas from France: The Legacy of French Theory