Castlereagh

London: Collins. Very Good. 1981. First Edition. Hardcover. 320 pages; Some pencil markings made by Susan Mary Alsop on several pages; otherwise contents clean and secure in original cloth binding with gilt lettering at spinein very good dustjacket. This was a reference book for Alsop's research for her book The Congress Dances: Vienna 1814-1815. From a review: "Few historic occasions lend themselves more naturally to petticoat history than the 1815 Congress of Vienna, where Tsar Alexander I, Austria's Metternich, Britain's Castlereagh & France's Talleyrand assembled to reconstruct Europe after the upheavals of the French Revolution & the Napoleonic era--where, notoriously, three international beauties--Dorothea de Talleyrand-Perigord, her sister Wilhelmina Sagan & Catherine Bragation--played prominent roles. Alsop (Lady Sackville, Yankees at the Court) sets the scene over-elaborately but animatedly: the life, character, domestic & diplomatic intrigues of all concerned; the victors' gala entrance into Paris; the truculent, anticlimactic return of Louis XVIII; Alexander's unfortunate visit to England. She's perfectly clear about what was involved--"the complex problem of establishing what Castlereagh called 'a real & permanent balance of power'"--&, in the course of the Congress, she shows how conflicts of interest (between Castlereagh's desire to strenghten the center against east & west & Talleyrand's fear of a strong Prussia, between Metternich & the tsar on Poland) threatened a new war." Though not signed, this book is from the collection of Susan Mary Patten Alsop, a popular historian and a pillar of Washington society, was the daughter of a diplomat, a descendant of founding father John Jay and served with her first husband Bill Patten at the American Embassy in Paris in the 1950s. When her husband died in 1960, she married Joseph Alsop, the journalist, the following year. In the 1970s she embarked on her own literary career producing "To Marietta From Paris: 1945-1960" (1974), followed by "Lady Sackville: A Biography" (1978), "Yankees at the Court: The First Americans in Paris" (1982), and "The Congress Dances: Vienna 1814-1815" (1984). Her Georgetown homes (both with and without Alsop) hosted dignitaries, publishers and a variety of interesting people during the 1960s and 1970s including such luminaries as John F. Kennedy, Phil Graham, Katharine Graham, and Isaiah Berlin, earning her the nickname "the grand dame of Washington society," (to which she rather objected). .