Countess Bitch
Robert Tombs, 16 November 1995
The Notorious Life of Gyp: Right-Wing Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle France
by Willa Silverman.
Oxford, 325 pp., £24, June 1995,0 19 508754 2 Show More
by Willa Silverman.
Oxford, 325 pp., £24, June 1995,
“... Who was Gyp? A woman of many names: a sign, suggests Willa Silverman, of her often-expressed unhappiness with her identity, and especially her sex. She was born Sibylle de Riquetti de Mirabeau in 1849, but her family decided to call her Gabrielle when she reached13 because she was too plain for a Sibylle. Married in 1869, to become the Comtesse de Martel de Janville, she lamented that as a woman she could not perpetuate the Mirabeau name, which she often appended to her own ... ”