This is a biography of the proto-feminist French author Louise Colet (1810-1876) incorporating numerous aspects of mid-19th-century European women's lives. Notoriously tempestuous and beautiful, Louise Colet is best known as the greatest love of Gustave Flaubert; as one of his models for Emma Bovary; and as the recipient of some of Flaubert's most treasured letters. What is less known is that at the apogee of her career she was, after George Sand, the most famous woman writer in France, a prolific author fluent in poetry, fiction, historical essays and journalism (she won the Academie Francaise poetry prize four times). A mistress of Alfred de Vigny, Victor Hugo and Leconte de Lisle, she was known as the muse and presided over one of the most popular salons of mid-19th-century Paris.