The Women of Chateau Lafayette
Stephanie Dray's The Women of Chateau Lafayette, published in 2021, is a sweeping historical novel that braids together three women across more than a century, each connected to the same storied estate in central France. Adrienne Lafayette is the brilliant young marquise of the late eighteenth century, devoted to her husband Gilbert as he fights in the American and French Revolutions, watching her family pay an unimaginable price under the Terror. Beatrice Astor Chanler is a glittering American socialite of the 1910s, an actress turned activist who throws her fortune and her unhappy marriage into rescuing French children orphaned by World War I, eventually transforming Lafayette's old chateau into a preventorium. And Marthe Simone is a fictional Jewish-French art student in 1940 who, raised at the same chateau as a war orphan, finds herself caught up in the Resistance under Nazi occupation. Dray weaves their three timelines together with the Chateau de Chavaniac as the constant. The result is a novel about female courage across centuries, the long thread of obligation and inheritance, and a real estate that has stood as a quiet monument to the ideals Lafayette spent his life chasing.
Where The Women of Chateau Lafayette keeps showing up
One of our editors' lists features this novel.
What you might want to know about The Women of Chateau Lafayette
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Three women come to the Lafayette family chateau of Chavaniac in Auvergne across three wars. In 1774 Adrienne Lafayette marries the young marquis. In 1916 New York actress Beatrice Astor Chanler raises money for the chateau orphanage.
Yes. The Women of Chateau Lafayette weaves three real women's lives across centuries at the Chateau de Lafayette: Adrienne Lafayette (American Revolution), Beatrice Astor Chanler (WWI), and Marthe Simone (WWII French Resistance). Stephanie Dray researched their documented lives extensively.
No. The Women of Chateau Lafayette is a standalone Stephanie Dray novel. Dray has written several other historical novels including America's First Daughter and My Dear Hamilton with Laura Kamoie.
The Women of Chateau Lafayette was written by Stephanie Dray, published in 2021 by Berkley.
The Women of Chateau Lafayette is 576 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Women of Chateau Lafayette takes most readers 9 to 12 hours to finish.
The Women of Chateau Lafayette is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
