LITERATURE + LECTURES

Brazos presents an Author Appearance:  Linda Urbach - MADAME BOVARY'S DAUGHTER.

Picking up after the shattering end of Gustave Flaubert’s classic, MADAME BOVARY, this beguiling novel imagines an answer to the question Whatever happened to Emma Bovary’s orphaned daughter?

One year after her mother’s suicide and just one day after her father’s brokenhearted demise, twelve-year-old Berthe Bovary is sent to live on her grandmother’s impoverished farm. Amid the beauty of the French countryside, Berthe models for the painter Jean-François Millet, but fate has more in store for her than a quiet life of simple pleasures.

Berthe’s determination to rise above her mother’s scandalous past will take her from the dangerous cotton mills of Lille to a convent in Rouen to the wealth and glamour of nineteenth-century Paris. There, as an apprentice to famed fashion designer Charles Frederick Worth, Berthe is ushered into the high society of which she once only dreamed. But even as the praise for her couture gowns steadily rises, she still yearns for the one thing her mother never had: the love of someone she loves in return.

Brilliantly integrating one of classic literature’s fictional creations with real historical figures, MADAME BOVARY'S DAUGHTER is an uncommon coming-of-age tale, a splendid excursion through the rags and the riches of French fashion, and a sweeping novel of poverty and wealth, passion and revenge.

Linda Howard Urbach is currently working on a new novel, Sarah’s Hair, the tangled story of Sarah Bernhardt’s hairdresser. Her first book, Expecting Miracles, was published by Putnam in the U.S (under the name Linda U. Howard). It was also published in England and France where it won the French Family Book Award. The book later sold to Paramount Pictures. Her second novel, The Money Honey, was also published by Putnam.

Linda is the originator of “MoMoirs -The Umbilical Cord Stops Here!” performed by members of the Theatre Artists Workshop. It premiered at the Zipper Theater in NYC. She created and runs www.MoMoirs .com. Writing Workshops For & About Moms. She was also an award winning advertising copywriter. (CLIO: “My Girdle’s Killing Me”)

Ms. Howard co-authored with Roberto Mitrotti “Fashionista” and “The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud” produced by 20th Century Fox Specialized Film Division. It stars Bud Cort, Carole Kane, Klaus Kinski and Marisa Berenson. (Three and a half stars, Video Movie Guide, 2002.) Her one act play “Scenes from A Cell” was a finalist in the 2002 New England One Act Festival.