Book Review: “The First Actress: A Novel of Sarah Bernhardt” (by C.W. Gortner)
By: Dr. Thomas J. West Iii
Tags: Book Review, Novel, Books, Biography, History

I’ve been a fan of C.W. Gortner’s historical novels for quite a while now. He has an uncanny knack for both finding the perfect subjects to write about and for identifying the key moments in their lives that make for the most compelling, and revealing, drama. While I’ve been particularly fond of his novels about royal women — particularly Isabella of Castile and Empress Marie of Russia — I’ve also found myself drawn to his portraits of more modern women, and his newest novel on the famed actress Sarah Bernhardt is no exception.

The novel begins with Sarah a child being raised in Brittany. Soon, however, she is brought to Paris by Julie, her courtesan mother, who quickly grows frustrated with her daughter’s rebellious streak. After a far-too-brief sojourn learning from nuns, Sarah becomes both a courtesan and an actress, though it is the stage that is her true calling. Eventually, through trials both personal and professional and nature, she manages to ascend to a position of prominence, becoming one of the most celebrated actresses of the age.

From the moment that she appears, Gortner’s Bernhardt casts her spell over the reader. She’s proud, there’s no question about that, but it’s also clear that she has the seed of greatness within her and that she will stop at nothing to make sure that he lives life on her own terms, not those of someone else: not her mother, not those in charge of Paris’s theatre scene, and not the other actors and actresses that try to stand in her way. While there are times when we get a little frustrated with her for her intransigence, it turns out that she knew what she was about, and she richly deserves the success that she eventually attains.

At the same time, Gortner does an excellent job of capturing the Paris of the late 19th Century. We wander with Sarah down the boulevards, we encounter the dissipated (and insufferably proud) aristocracy, we come face-to-face with the ridiculous but powerful Emperor Napoleon III. We also get to stand by while she meets with Edward, the Prince of Wales (who prefers to be called Bertie) and becomes fast friends with none other than Oscar Wilde, one of the most famous (one might say infamous) poets and writers of the 19th Century.

For there’s no doubt that the 19th Century that Sarah inhabited was a time of immense cultural change, and she is often caught up in it. One of the chief conflicts of the novel is Sarah’s desire to embrace styles of acting that are anathema to the hide-bound and quite conservative members of France’s foremost theatre company. Time and again, those who can’t see the future — and who are unwilling to change anything about themselves or how they do things — attempt to quash Sarah’s relentless and restless spirit of innovation. Fortunately for her, she’s not the type to let others, no matter how powerful they might be, tell her what to do and, as a result, she almost always ends up winning in the end. In Gortner’s capable hands, Bernhardt becomes something of an incandescent figure, blazing a new trail and urging others to follow her. She becomes, in essence, a celebrity and a star in our modern sense of the word, with the public demanding to have a little bit of Bernhardt in their homes (this is also the time when photography was fast becoming the medium of modernity).

However, being an agent of change entails great sacrifice and, driven as she is by her ambition and her desire to succeed in the world of the arts, it’s not really surprising that Sarah’s personal life suffers, and she endures quite a lot of tragedy during the course of the novel. She loses one of her younger sisters to consumption, and the other, having followed their mother Julie into the world of being a courtesan, dies of an opium overdose.

And yet, for all of the tragedy, there are moments of genuine human warmth aplenty, from the older woman who becomes a second mother to Sarah to the great Alexandre Dumas, who takes her under his wing and helps her along professionally. And, of course, there is Sarah’s son Maurice, whom she loves with a fierce and protective passion. Some of the most touching moments in The First Actress involve her relationship with this young man that she decided to raise on her own, even knowing that her society didn’t look kindly on women who raised a child out of wedlock in front of everyone.

For it’s important to realize just how extraordinary Bernhardt was as a woman willing to maintain her independence. In one of the novel’s most revealing passages, she at last confronts her mother Julie, and the two of them realize that, despite their strong dislike for one another, they have far more in common than either of them have ever wanted to acknowledge. It’s a powerful moment, not just because it shows how much they have fundamentally misunderstood one another (one can almost imagine one of them saying, “You mean, all this time we could have been friend?”) but also because it shows that each of them is aware of the fraught position that women occupy in their world.

The First Actress is a historical novel of the highest order. In some ways, it’s very much like the biopics of classical Hollywood. It takes a particularly important part of this historical figure’s life and puts it under a microscope, allowing us to see how the things that happened during this period shaped their entire persona and later life and actions.

Sarah Bernhardt was, truly, one of the most extraordinary women to have lived during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, a woman driven by desire yet who knew how to get what she wanted from a world always unwilling to give it to her. Fortunately, Gortner is a novelist more than capable of bringing her extraordinary personality to life.