The Portrait Of Zelide

1926. Madame de Charriere, or Zelide as she called herself, was born in 1740 in Zuilen, near Utrecht, under the name Isabella van Tuyll van Serooskerken. She was a writer and composer whose written work was influenced by Diderot and Rousseau. Her philosophically reflective and psychologically astute novels, which included Three Women and Caliste, or Letters Written from Lausanne, were not only critical of moral conventions but also anticipated mid-nineteenth-century ideas of emancipation. The author of this biography, Geoffrey Scott, was an architect and close friend of Edith Wharton. Scott's short-lived romance with Vita Sackville-West has been attributed to his literary aspirations. Within a two year period he had published the second edition of the Architecture of Humanism, a collection of poems, and The Portrait of Zelide, for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.