REVIEWS 73 Biography" implies, to me at least, an inner turmoil of dissension and discontent which is remarkably absent from these pages. These writers may be casting one oblique eye over their collective shoulder toward their theoretical attackers, but they do not suffer from the collective inferiority complex such a title implies. Theirs is a positive, almost joyous delight in the work they do, and that is why I would have preferred that the book be titled with a phrase from the last sentence of Bradbury's excellent summation essay. He has argued intelligently and forcefully for the modern biographer 's attention and responsiveness to the complex demands of "art and the modern artist's nature," and has urged that the only way this can happen is for the biographer to enter willingly "into the labyrinth, where the biographer's own construction becomes part of contemporary writerly anxiety." Into the Labyrinth strikes me, therefore, as a much more accurate description of what this book is all about. Deirdre Bair Philadelphia, PA Celia Bertin, Marie Bonaparte. A Life (1982). New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. 286 pp. paperback. $12.95. I had read La Dernière Bonaparte when it was published in 1982 (Paris: Librairie Académique Perrin), and I was looking forward to reading it again in English. But why is the French version a wonderful biography, while the English one is pedestrian? Is this a translation or an adaptation of the French book? The lonely little rich orphan, Napoleon's great-grandniece and the granddaughter of the mysterious François Blanc, the principal real-estate developer of Monte Carlo and owner of its casino and of the Société des Bains de Mer, was brought up by a father and a grandmother unconcerned about her welfare, but very much interested in her enormous fortune. Prince Roland Bonaparte, Marie's father, was an important geographer and the author of several scientific monographs, and today he is still credited with describing over 50,000 specimens of ferns. He occasionally took the time to teach his precocious daughter, who was a brilliant student; at the same time, he discouraged her fondness for learning and he seems never to have shown any spontaneous affection or any empathy for her needs and tastes. She suffered keenly from his abandonment and turned inward, developing an attitude that would remain with her for the rest of her life: "Whenever my instinctual impulses, of whatever kind, broke against the wall or reality, it was ... by taking refuge in intellectual sublimation that I found peace and happiness." Raised without a mother by simple-minded women who lacked the insight to respond to an intelligent child, Marie became estranged from life around her and withdrew into writing and neurosis. She began filling copy books with stories and poems in English, German, and French at a very young age, but it was only after completing her analysis with Sigmund Freud in her middle years that she really became a writer, a prolific author with more than a dozen books and almost a hundred articles, essays, and other pieces to her name. What exactly was Marie's neurosis? From these pages, there emerges a childhood spent in fear of illness. At the age of four, in 1886, she developed a mild case of tuberculosis , the illness from which her mother had died. After that, in fear of the consequences that a premature death would have on her father's finances—her fortune had 74 biography Vol. 12, No. 1 been inherited from her mother and would revert to her maternal relatives if she died childless—she was treated as a semi-invalid to be kept in seclusion. Such an upbringing may account for her anxieties, her phobias about poisoning, her multiple, often unnecessary operations, her psychosomatic symptoms, and her chronic illnesses and occasional accidents. Because this biography draws heavily on Marie Bonaparte's own writings, it reflects her self-vision rather than the view the world-at-large had of her. Beautiful and wealthy, she led one of the most glamorous lives of any woman in the twentieth century . At the age of 18, in December 1907, after having been blackmailed...