Anne Golon (1921–2017)
Author of Angélique: Marquise of the Angels
About the Author
Disambiguation Notice:
This is Anne Golon, the same author known (in collaboration with her husband) as Sergeanne Golon.
Series
Works by Anne Golon
Angelique - Marquise of The Angels (Complete and Unabridged): 1 - Childhood (Angelique Books) (2021) 5 copies
Angélique se révolte, tome 2 1 copy
Angelique se Revolte-1 1 copy
Angélique lente in Quebec 1 copy
Angélique omnibus ****** 1 copy
Associated Works
Angelique: The Complete 5-Film Collection — Original book — 3 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Changeux, Simone
- Other names
- Danterne, Joëlle
- Birthdate
- 1921-12-17
- Date of death
- 2017-07-14
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- écrivain
scénariste
reporter
journalist - Agent
- N. Goloubinoff -Archange International
- Relationships
- Golon, Serge (husband)
Golon, Sergeanne - Short biography
- Auteur notamment de Master Kouki, Le Caillou d'or, La Patrouille des saints innocents, Alerte au Tchad , sous le nom de Joëlle Danterne, AG écrit films, articles, fonde un magazine. Reporter en Afrique, y rencontre l'ingénieur chimio-géologue Vsevolod Goloubinoff.qui l'aidera aux premières recherches historiques d'Angélique, parru en 1956 en Allemagne sous le nom de son auteur :Anne Golon. L'agent Opéra Mundi exige quîl soit publié en France sous un nom d'homme "pour faire plus sérieux": compromis aux deux pseudos en 1957 et à Sergeanne Golon pour les éditions en anglais . SG se consacre à la peinture de1960 à sa mort en 1972.
Anne Golon écrit 18 livres d'Angélique. Elle travaille maintenant à sa version intégrale plus la suite. 4 tomes sont déjà publiés à l'Archipel. - Cause of death
- peritonitis
- Nationality
- France
- Birthplace
- Toulon, France
- Places of residence
- Suisse
- Place of death
- Chesnay, France
Versailles, France - Disambiguation notice
- This is Anne Golon, the same author known (in collaboration with her husband) as Sergeanne Golon.
- Associated Place (for map)
- France
Members
Reviews
A colleague once recommended the Angelique books by Anne Golon, knowing how much I love The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy, but the English translations are hard to find (and expensive!) Luddite that I am, I finally discovered a PDF copy of the first novel, which I have been reading on my Kindle for the past two weeks! 800 pages for a first novel, which eventually became a series with twelve sequels!
Despite the small text, which I had to read in landscape format, and the never-ending show more pages, I did enjoy Angelique. Set in mid-seventeenth century France, the titular heroine is the daughter of an impoverished nobleman - is there any other kind? - who is a bit of a wild tomboy in her youth, playing in the forest with the village peasants, but also a budding beauty with golden hair and green eyes. Her father marries her off to a 'lame and disfigured' count, Joffrey de Peyrac, twelve years older than Angelique, whom she at first refuses to submit to but eventually falls in love with. Joffrey is meant to be the romantic hero of the novel but I could not take him seriously at all. He's a self-made man and a talented scientist who extracts gold and silver from rocks while also being a ladies' man with a 'golden voice' who teaches about the art of love in his 'Palace of Gay Learning' (I'm guessing the meaning got lost in translation over the years!) Joffrey woos his very young bride by serenading her and waiting for her to give into him because he's so incredibly irresistible to women, despite his scars and limp (from being thrown out of a window into the snow as a baby!)
Angelique is happy with Joffrey and they have a son together but when the two travel to Paris to attend the wedding of King Louis XIV to the Infanta of Spain, the romantic melodrama kicks up a notch or ten! (And yes, despite all the reviewers in denial, Angelique is definitely a romance novel - well researched but hardly serious historical literature for all that.) After offending the fragile ego of the King, Joffrey is thrown into the Bastille on trumped-up charges of witchcraft and faces trial, which his wife attends in secret, dressed as a nun! Conditioned by the Pimpernel books, I was expecting a last-minute escape but Angelique is left in Paris to survive on her own, with a young son and a baby on the way. What I love about the character is how resourceful and indomitable she is, battling lovers and assassins, living in poverty in the Court of Miracles with thieves and beggars and then rising again to earn money working in a tavern. She also takes stupid risks and attracts all the wrong men, who she can't seem to resist, from childhood playmates turned gang leaders to cruel and ruthless noblemen. Golon is a bit sketchy about the line between romantic conquest and rape, too, which caused a few raised eyebrows while reading. Angelique never loses her stunning beauty, either, despite ten years of poverty in Paris:
And Angelique was lovely. She had a proud carriage and in her eyes an expression that was at once reserved and bold. These eyes could at times transmit insolence, a challenge, but also the innocence of a very young and sincere person. Her smile transformed her, revealing the warmth of feeling she bore to her fellow creatures and to life.
Is Angelique a whacking great romantic cliché? Hell, yes, but she's entertaining and (mostly) sympathetic too. Did the book need to be 800 pages long, however? Not at all. Will I be joining Angelique in Versailles (book two)? Not for a while! And do I suspect that we haven't heard the last of Joffrey ...? show less
Despite the small text, which I had to read in landscape format, and the never-ending show more pages, I did enjoy Angelique. Set in mid-seventeenth century France, the titular heroine is the daughter of an impoverished nobleman - is there any other kind? - who is a bit of a wild tomboy in her youth, playing in the forest with the village peasants, but also a budding beauty with golden hair and green eyes. Her father marries her off to a 'lame and disfigured' count, Joffrey de Peyrac, twelve years older than Angelique, whom she at first refuses to submit to but eventually falls in love with. Joffrey is meant to be the romantic hero of the novel but I could not take him seriously at all. He's a self-made man and a talented scientist who extracts gold and silver from rocks while also being a ladies' man with a 'golden voice' who teaches about the art of love in his 'Palace of Gay Learning' (I'm guessing the meaning got lost in translation over the years!) Joffrey woos his very young bride by serenading her and waiting for her to give into him because he's so incredibly irresistible to women, despite his scars and limp (from being thrown out of a window into the snow as a baby!)
Angelique is happy with Joffrey and they have a son together but when the two travel to Paris to attend the wedding of King Louis XIV to the Infanta of Spain, the romantic melodrama kicks up a notch or ten! (And yes, despite all the reviewers in denial, Angelique is definitely a romance novel - well researched but hardly serious historical literature for all that.) After offending the fragile ego of the King, Joffrey is thrown into the Bastille on trumped-up charges of witchcraft and faces trial, which his wife attends in secret, dressed as a nun! Conditioned by the Pimpernel books, I was expecting a last-minute escape but Angelique is left in Paris to survive on her own, with a young son and a baby on the way. What I love about the character is how resourceful and indomitable she is, battling lovers and assassins, living in poverty in the Court of Miracles with thieves and beggars and then rising again to earn money working in a tavern. She also takes stupid risks and attracts all the wrong men, who she can't seem to resist, from childhood playmates turned gang leaders to cruel and ruthless noblemen. Golon is a bit sketchy about the line between romantic conquest and rape, too, which caused a few raised eyebrows while reading. Angelique never loses her stunning beauty, either, despite ten years of poverty in Paris:
And Angelique was lovely. She had a proud carriage and in her eyes an expression that was at once reserved and bold. These eyes could at times transmit insolence, a challenge, but also the innocence of a very young and sincere person. Her smile transformed her, revealing the warmth of feeling she bore to her fellow creatures and to life.
Is Angelique a whacking great romantic cliché? Hell, yes, but she's entertaining and (mostly) sympathetic too. Did the book need to be 800 pages long, however? Not at all. Will I be joining Angelique in Versailles (book two)? Not for a while! And do I suspect that we haven't heard the last of Joffrey ...? show less
Firstly, if you didn't already read Book One, please do so now.
Still with me? To be fair, after the disturbing shambles of Book One I didn't plan to continue, but I found myself literally haunted by the story, so I not only had to re-assess what I'd read, I also had to find out what happened next. And indeed there is a sense in this second volume that when you reach the bottom, like our heroine, the only way to go is up. Angelique is somewhat changed since the events in Volume One. Where show more before she was merely obnoxious, here she is heartless and manipulative, which puts her on a level with the other characters. Where in conventional fiction virtue is rewarded and evil is punished, Golon turns this on its head. In 17th century Paris the good perish and the evil prosper.
That's not to say there's no fun to be had as Angelique claws her way back into polite society by any means necessary, which includes sleeping with every major male character. But it's a guilty pleasure, and at the end of the day isn't that the best kind? And if you enjoy the kind of emotional catharsis that comes from period melodrama this is a satisfying conclusion to the story. show less
Still with me? To be fair, after the disturbing shambles of Book One I didn't plan to continue, but I found myself literally haunted by the story, so I not only had to re-assess what I'd read, I also had to find out what happened next. And indeed there is a sense in this second volume that when you reach the bottom, like our heroine, the only way to go is up. Angelique is somewhat changed since the events in Volume One. Where show more before she was merely obnoxious, here she is heartless and manipulative, which puts her on a level with the other characters. Where in conventional fiction virtue is rewarded and evil is punished, Golon turns this on its head. In 17th century Paris the good perish and the evil prosper.
That's not to say there's no fun to be had as Angelique claws her way back into polite society by any means necessary, which includes sleeping with every major male character. But it's a guilty pleasure, and at the end of the day isn't that the best kind? And if you enjoy the kind of emotional catharsis that comes from period melodrama this is a satisfying conclusion to the story. show less
A series of unfortunate events. The heroine isn't particularly likeable, and although other characters in the book consider her bright and precocious, her actions show her to be naïve and foolish, and she's unwittingly the architect of her own misfortunes. She's such an underdog though that it's impossible not to root for her.
In fairness this is only the first volume of a novel originally published as one unfeasibly cumbersome tome. Perhaps events will be less unfortunate in the second half?
In fairness this is only the first volume of a novel originally published as one unfeasibly cumbersome tome. Perhaps events will be less unfortunate in the second half?
Still a great trash read. The tale of the "emerald-eyed slave of passion" was a great escape 50 years ago, and still reads well today. The first book is the best of the lot, while the sequels show a progressive deterioration. For those who require a moral justification, you do learn some French history
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- Rating
- 3.9
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