Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Biography & Memoir
Episode: Adam Zamoyski, "Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Princess" (William Collins, 2024)
Description: Princess Izabela Czartoryska was a towering figure of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century European cultural and intellectual life. Married at sixteen to a distinguished older aristocrat, she amassed learning, influence, and a role in both Polish and European statecraft through encounters with figures ranging from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Joseph II of Austria. After the liquidation of her homeland’s sovereignty with its third partition in 1795, she spent the final decades of her life pioneering and curating spaces of preservation, both of Polish nationhood and of the human experience writ large. Izabela the Valiant: The Story of an Indomitable Polish Pri...