Book description
A biography of Winnaretta Singer-Polignac, heiress to the Singer Sewing Machine fortune, who befriended and subsidized some of the most important musical and literary artists of the 20th Century, including Stravinsky, Proust, Ravel, Cocteau, and Colette.
The American-born Winnaretta Singer (1865-1943) was a millionaire at the age of eighteen, due…
Why read it?
1 author picked Music's Modern Muse as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Women deracinated by migration and diminished by exile, and their struggle for purposeful lives in new countries, leveraged only by their desperation and will, abound in novels, memoirs, and biographies. Music’s Modern Muse is not that story. It chronicles the life of Winnaretta Singer, daughter of American industrialist Isaac Merrit Singer, inventor of the Singer Sewing Machine, whom she worshipped, and a French mother of great beauty who withheld affection from Winnaretta who had not inherited her mother’s looks. Her father’s death made her a millionaire in her teens—one of the richest women in Europe. But this is no "Nepo…
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