Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness

A novel based on the life of eighteenth-century aristocrat Lucy Dillon, who survived the French Revolution’s Terror and embraced a new life in America.

A daughter of noble privilege whose mother was once a favorite of Queen Marie Antoinette, Lucy Dillon mingled in high society circles but acted with an unconventional spirit inherited from her Irish ancestors. Wedded to military officer Frédéric-Séraphin, the Marquis de La Tour-du-Pin, she embraced her life as wife and mother while assuming her mother’s place as a lady-in-waiting to the queen.

Then in 1789, her family went into hiding as the Revolution swept through Paris, feeding the aristocracy to the thirsty guillotine. They escaped to America and started a new life as farmers in the Hudson Valley. There Lucy rises to the challenge of the hard physical labor, finding new meaning and purpose away from the pomp and circumstance that once defined her role, further inspired by the American way of life after meeting Alexander Hamilton and his father-in-law Philip Schuyler, and reuniting with her friend Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand, the French statesman in exile.

But now the Revolution has ended. A new French government has been established, and Frédéric is ready to return home to reclaim his wealth and birthright. But after so many years of toil, Lucy is no longer the noblewoman she once was . . .

“A beautiful, authentic, intelligent, and page-turning story . . . a feast for the senses.” —Amy Tan

“Written in elegant, spare sentences that recall the language of the period . . . Bluebird forms that rare, exquisite hybrid: a historical novel where the history lesson works to illuminate the life of the hero instead of the other way around.” —Time Out New York

Sheila Kohler was born in Johannesburg, South Africa. Upon matriculation at seventeen, she left for Europe. Kohler lived for fifteen years in Paris, where she got married and completed an undergraduate degree in literature at the Sorbonne and a graduate degree in psychology at the Institut Catholique. After raising her three children, she moved to the United States in 1981 and earned an MFA in writing at Columbia.
 
Kohler has taught at The Writer’s Voice, SUNY Purchase, Sarah Lawrence, Colgate, CCNY, Bennington, Columbia, and Princeton.