Lovers and Tyrants is an erotic, urgent and enormously funny novel in the historical tradition of those writers whose art has radically expanded women's consciousness - Virginia Woolf, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Mary McCarthy, Doris Lessing. Francine Gray delivers us from many traditional literary inhibitions and opens a startling new perspective into the inner lives of women. The history of Stephanie-the woman whose life is chronicled-follows her from her extraordinary childhood in France through her father's mysterious disappearance, her emigration to America, her picaresque schooling in New York, her tempestuous sexual relationship with a melodramatic, tragicomic European Nobleman. She goes on to engage herself in the major conflicts of modern times-marriage, politics, feminism, religious quests.
Every phase of Stephanie's life illustrates our painful ambivalence toward the irreconcilable poles of love and liberation, security and freedom. "The most tyrannical despots can be the ones who love us the most." Lovers can be tyrants. She flees the contradictions of her rigidly structured marriage to a moment when her life is threatened by illness, finding temporary refuge with a young bisexual to whom she is a tutor, lover, and fellow pilgrim.
In a hallucinatory journey through the Southwestern desert to the gaudy retreat of Las Vegas, writing love letters to her husband, Stephanie brings the reader to a lyrical and surreal vision of hard-won freedom, Lovers and Tyrants establishes Francine Gray as one of the most brilliant and exuberant fiction talents to emerge in a decade.