“It is so difficult, in recalling one’s past, not to read into it an ordered sequence of cause and effect and beginning and end.”
Rita Lydig, Tragic Mansions
Rita Lydig, Tragic Mansions
 "Tragic Mansions" |  Rita Lydig; Photograph by Baron de Meyer |
Rita Lydig was one of the women of beauty, grace, and imagination profiled in Annette Tapert and Diana Edkins's The Power of Style, The Women Who Defined the Art of Living Well. They found her more tragic than her contemporaries, writing that she instead belonged "to the novels of Balzac, to the pages of Turgenev, the stories of Maupassant." In fact, Lydig found tragedy not only in her life, but in most of fashionable society. Without revealing their actual names, in Tragic Mansions she chronicles the quiet anguish of her friends and acquaintances--people who seemingly had every advantage but somehow squandered it.
Sometimes in the book world, rare is overused. However, Tragic Mansions is truly is so. No copies are currently available on the resale market, nor were there in 2014, when Nick Harvill Libraries offered a copy signed by Rita Lydig (now sold). There are copies of Tragic Mansions in the collection of libraries in a dozen or so cities. Also, there is the chapter on Rita Lydig in The Power of Style.
Another source on Rita Lydig is the memoir of her younger sister, the nearly as tragic Mercedes de Acosta (but, oh, what adventures both sisters had!). There was a sixteen-year age difference between the two, and In Here Lies the Heart, Mercedes fondly recalls the exquisite Rita treating her as an adult but also acting as her mentor, taking an adolescent Mercedes to Paris and introducing her to Rodin, Boldini, D'Annunzio, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Wharton, and other luminaries.
Sometimes in the book world, rare is overused. However, Tragic Mansions is truly is so. No copies are currently available on the resale market, nor were there in 2014, when Nick Harvill Libraries offered a copy signed by Rita Lydig (now sold). There are copies of Tragic Mansions in the collection of libraries in a dozen or so cities. Also, there is the chapter on Rita Lydig in The Power of Style.
Another source on Rita Lydig is the memoir of her younger sister, the nearly as tragic Mercedes de Acosta (but, oh, what adventures both sisters had!). There was a sixteen-year age difference between the two, and In Here Lies the Heart, Mercedes fondly recalls the exquisite Rita treating her as an adult but also acting as her mentor, taking an adolescent Mercedes to Paris and introducing her to Rodin, Boldini, D'Annunzio, Sarah Bernhardt, Edith Wharton, and other luminaries.
 Rita Lydig; Photo by Baron de Meyer |  Merecedes de Acosta; Photograph by Marlene Dietrich |
Image Credit: The Power of Style and Here Lies the Heart
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