The Divine Sarah

Graham Robb

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Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt
by Robert Gottlieb
Yale University Press, 233 pp., $25.00

“No temperament more histrionic than Mme Bernhardt’s has, perhaps, ever existed,” wrote the obituarist of the London Times. “To read her memoirs is to live in a whirl of passions and adventures—floods of tears, tornadoes of rage, deathly sickness and incomparable health and energy.” As Robert Gottlieb warns in his appropriately lively biography, “She was a complete realist when dealing with her life but a relentless fabulist when recounting it.”

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