Finding the Woman Who Didn't Exist: The Curious Life of Gisèle d'Estoc

Acknowledgments

ix Acknowledgments This book was a long time in the making, and along the way I have accumulated many debts. There are many people to thank, and some are acknowledged in notes to the text, but special mention must be made of Christian Laucou, who was one of the first people to set me thinking about the enigma that was Gisèle d’Estoc. I also had help along the way from Philippe Oriol, Gilles Picq, and Richard Shryock. Eleanor Albert helped out with some photos, Cheryl Morgan put me up (and put up with me), and Lynn Higgins introduced me to my dedicatee. Several units at Texas a&m University supported the research that made this book possible, including the Department of European and Classical Languages and Cultures, the Office of the Dean of Liberal Arts, and the Glasscock Center for Humanities Research. Parts of the book were presented as work in progress at scholarly conferences such as the NineteenthCentury French Studies Colloquium and the Workshop on Cultural Production in Nineteenth-Century France at the University of Florida Paris Research Center, and I am grateful to those communities of scholars in general for their support and interest. Many librarians and archivists smoothed the way for me, including J. Fernando Peña, curator of collections at the Grolier Club in New York. As always , I owe a huge debt to the members of my writing group: I hope this will be an addition to the collective cv that you will be proud to share credit for. And I owe a special thank you to Mathilde Huet, someone I am now pleased to call a friend, who shared so generously her own research. As for the title? Thanks, Patty! Finding the Woman Who Didn’t Exist ...