Cruel banquet

the long version

"Frida's banquet, in many ways, is the tale of her encounters with the seminal cultural figures of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Augustus John. Her life embodied the fin-de-siecle generation, the contradiction in the relationships between men and women, between art and commerce.". "In 1893, one year out of convent school, Frida married the forty-three-year-old controversial Swedish playwright, August Strindberg. The marriage took place against the wishes of her father - one of Austria's most important drama critics; it lasted eighteen months. A divorcee by twenty-four, Frida successfully improvised a career as a cultural impresario. She saw herself as equal to men and made little distinction between her private and public lives. She never hesitated to draw on her feminine charms or maternal qualities to launch or hold a "discovery," nor did she spare her lovers or her children the calculations of a businesswoman." "Monica Strauss fashions a complex look at Frida Strindberg's stubborn pursuit of a cultural role and her continuing struggle with the aftermath of her youthful marriage."--BOOK JACKET.