A good overview of Pauline Bonaparte's life. While Pauline never makes for dull reading, I do wish the author had ventured to provide more definitive answers about some aspects of Pauline's life. For example, rumors are mentioned of an affair between Pauline and her brother Napoleon, but Fraser refrains from addressing the truth of these rumors, leaving the reader with maybe or maybe not as the biographer's take on the rumors. Nevertheless, very entertaining. ( )

I was thoroughly bored for most of the book. I attribute this to the rather inconsequential subject, though perhaps it is the writing. I don't feel that I know anything significant for having finished the book.

People who are historically fairly unimportant can make interesting subjects for biographies. Often, one gets a better feeling for the time period because the author has the space to include the details of personal and social life that are scanted in dealing with major figures. Ann Wroe used her biography of Perkin Warbeck, The Perfect Prince: Truth and Deception in Renaissance Europe, to great effect to discuss the time, the making of history and the nature of identity. Bastard Prince: Henry VIII's Lost Son by Beverly Murphy gave us a much better look at the rearing of a high-born man that any of his father's biographies ever could. I felt a conflict with this book because Fraser seemed to think that Pauline was interesting and important in her own right and I certainly don't agree.

Fraser kept the book very narrowly focussed on Pauline: I wondered what happened to her widower Prince Borghese after his liberation. I think that it would have added to the interest of the book if Fraser had gone into the family history a little more, although perhaps she feels that given Napoleon's fame, this has been adequately covered elsewhere. Fraser also fails to carefully consider Pauline's various pronouncements on religion. Just after her brother's coronation, she tells Pope Pius VII that he will have to live to be very old if he is ever to see her as a member of his flock. Later, we are told, without explanation or evidence, that she was at heart of believer, and made a good impression on the Pope.

Fraser quotes Metternich: "Pauline Bonaparte was as beautiful as it was possible to be ... She was in love with herself alone, and her sole occupation was with pleasure." She actually did concern herself with other people, like her exiled brother Napoleon, on rare occasions, and Fraser tends to react as if such ordinary feelings are an example of heroism. In short, Pauline was the sort of famous person that I never heard of so often chronicled in Harper's Bazaar, Vanity Fair, People, and society pages: impotent aristocrats, hard partying celebrities, idle children of the wealthy. As such, I would have to admit that there are no doubt many people who will find her fascinating.

Pauline Bonaparte was apparently extremely beautiful and alluring, and she was the favorite sister of Napoleon. This allowed her to devote her trivial life to truly obnoxious behavior, one of the most striking instances being requiring her ladies to lay on the floor so that she could rest her feet on their throats, in lieu of a footstool. If Pauline charmed British aristocrats and the Pope and Cardinals by her beauty, the more fool they, in my opinion. Some people are intrigued by such power, inconsequential though it tends to be in the long run, and I recommend the book to them. Beauty seems to be enough for Fraser: apparently Pauline's chief claim on our attention is being the scantily-clad model for the famous Canova statue. I could see this as an article in a magazine, but spread over a couple of hundred pages, it wore thin fast. ( )