Three Women in a Mirror by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt

She has just married into one of the wealthiest and most prestigious families of the upper classes. Hanna is living in Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century. Others think she is in league with the devil. Some think she has the makings of a saint. But Anne is more interested in staring at butterflies and the way a ray of sun spreads across the room, and soon she is running away to freedom and nature to hide in the woods and commune with an ancient tree. She is getting ready for her wedding day, and everyone envies Anne her gorgeous fiancé, especially her cousin Ida, who envies her beyond all common sense.

Three different women, three different time periods and destinies, but what if they are one and the same woman? This is what we are meant to reflect upon as we read the alternating narratives, which start with beautiful Anne, in Bruges, sometime in the 16th century. Schmitt’s three complex stories are beautifully translated and masterfully written.” - Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Read more “Schmitt writes movingly about three women, divided by time and distance, whose lives connect when they attempt to break free of expectations imposed by society . . . Both her curse and her solace, acting will give her the key to an open a new chapter in her life where she will find love, companionship, and the meaning she has been searching for. Anny is a Hollywood star of the 2000s, addicted to celebrity and to variety of illicit substances. She is a young noblewoman, dissatisfied with bourgeois conventions, who will find a method for uncovering the roots of her malaise in a new cure developed by a Viennese doctor by the name of Sigmund Freud. Hanna lives in Vienna at the start of the twentieth century. Yet her ideas run against the temper of the times and result in her being branded a heretic, with tragic consequences. She’s a mystic who talks with animals like Saint Francis she finds God in nature and cannot understand the need for religious rituals. Despite the centuries that divide them, their stories intersect-a surprising narrative technique that lends increasing tension and richness to this novel, which builds to a thrilling crescendo of unexpected revelations.Īnne lives in Flanders in the sixteenth century. Three young women, free spirits all, each one at odds with the age in which they live. “A miraculous book in praise of women, in praise of both their shortcomings and their strengths” from the internationally bestselling author ( l’Express).Īnne, Hanna, and Anny.

Three Women in a Mirror by Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt