![]() When Zelle went bankrupt, he and his wife separated, and when Margaretha was 14, Antje died. Because I had researched the colonial period in Indonesia extensively for another book She writes, “revious biographers had neglected her married years in the Dutch East Indies. Shipman prudently resists racing ahead, like a teen reading “Lady Chatterley,” to the steamy bits and begins with a thorough investigation of her subject’s early life. Yet as Pat Shipman makes clear in her new biography, “Femme Fatale: Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari,” the case was prosecuted chiefly on grounds of immorality and her conviction based on questionable evidence. Margaretha Geertruida Zelle MacLeod, as she was known before reinventing herself as a glamorous and overtly sexual dancer, was executed by a French firing squad in 1917 after being convicted of spying for Germany. ![]() ![]() Uncertainty, it turns out, is a vital part of Mata Hari’s story. I knew Mata Hari had been a spy, though for whom, and when, remained hazy. ![]() Its cartoon backdrop showed a brunette, supine on a tiger-skin rug and wearing bejeweled underwear, offering a debonair fellow a secret map. UNTIL a few weeks ago, much of what I knew of Mata Hari I’d gathered from an eponymous pinball machine I’d played as a child. ![]() Love, Lies, and the Unknown Life of Mata Hari ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |