Carolly Erickson

Carolly Erickson was a historian and novelist known for turning extensive knowledge of European courts into vivid narrative. She wrote royal biographies before bringing the same settings to historical fiction. The Secret Life of Josephine imagines Josephine Bonaparte's path from a childhood in Martinique through revolutionary France and her turbulent marriage to Napoleon. The novel gives its subject an intimate first-person voice, combining recorded events with invented scenes and a fictional relationship involving Scipion du Roure. St. Martin's Press made its 2007 edition available with the complete title The Secret Life of Josephine: Napoleon's Bird of Paradise. Erickson had previously written the nonfiction biography Josephine, so the later novel represents a deliberate change of form rather than an attempt to disguise fiction as documentary history. She uses that freedom to explore fear, ambition, attraction, and survival inside political upheaval. Margot Dionne narrates the audiobook. The Secret Life of Josephine is best read as a biographical novel shaped by a historian's command of period detail.