Lady with a Past: A Petulant French Sculptor, His Quest for Immortality, and the Real Story of the Statue of Liberty (Kindle Single)

Lady with a Past: A Petulant French Sculptor, His Quest for Immortality, and the Real Story of the Statue of Liberty (Kindle Single) Review

Much of what you learned in grade school about our most beloved American icon is wrong. For starters, the Statue of Liberty was originally meant for Egypt, conceived to be a slave greeting travelers on the Suez Canal. And when instead she landed on American shores, she wasn’t an outright gift from France, but the remarkable scheme of a grandiose Frenchman who tried to hustle everyone from Ulysses S. Grant to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in an attempt to get his colossus built—somewhere.

In this surprising and entertaining biography of America's most famous metal Amazon, Elizabeth Mitchell, author of the Byliner Original bestseller The Fearless Mrs. Goodwin, provides a portrait of not just the Statue of Liberty but her deluded creator. Powered by fierce ambition and ego, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi spent nearly two decades building Lady Liberty, which he considered to be less a symbol of freedom than a monument to himself. In Bartholdi's remarkable, mostly overlooked diary and in colorful letters to his mother—the model for Liberty's imposing face—Mitchell finds a comically self-serving artiste who looks down his Gallic nose at the young and burgeoning United States. But it’s those same "subpar" Americans who, in the end, get the job done. Timed to the 125th anniversary of the statue, Mitchell's book tells the real, unvarnished story of how Lady Liberty, beacon to the world, came to be.

Elizabeth Mitchell is the author of Three Strides Before the Wire: The Dark and Beautiful World of Horse Racing, W.: Revenge of the Bush Dynasty, and the Byliner bestseller The Fearless Mrs. Goodwin.

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Praise for "Lady with a Past":

“Elizabeth Mitchell is one of the smartest writers I know and you won’t want to miss her take on our lady of the harbor.”

— Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler" and "How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III."

“Mitchell has written a page-turner, exposing the riveting history of the Statue of Liberty, a tale far more brilliant in its complexity than the short-hand version we all know. A stunning jewel of intrigue.”

— Martha McPhee, National Book Award finalist and the author of "Bright Angel Time," "Gorgeous Lies," "L'America," and "Dear Money."