Author Interview: Mary Beth Raycraft, A Parisienne in Chicago: Impressions of the World’s Columbian Exposition

As a former academic-to-be, I love books published by academic presses, especially those that seem so well-suited to a mainstream audience and yet don’t seem to get the appreciation they deserve by the general reading public. So many so-called “academic” books are so much better-written, better-developed and more fun to read than their mainstream counterparts on bookstore shelves that it’s a shame they don’t get more press.

A Parisienne in Chicago: Impressions of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Mary Beth Raycraft’s translation of an 1894 French book byMadame Leon Grandin, is one such book. Despite its roots in academia (Raycraft is senior lecturer in French at Vanderbilt, and the book was published by the University of Illinois Press), it reads like the insightful diary that it is, by a well-educated, middle-class Parisian woman who wanted to soak in all the big and tiny details of her life in late-19th-century Chicago and share them with her future readers.

Ms. Raycraft was kind enough to agree to an interview with me for My Inner French Girl, which you can immediately access by clicking here on on the link at the end of this post. We talked about how she came across the original source material, the unusual lens through which the author, Mme. Grandin, saw the United States in general and American women in particular, and how much/little has changed since the 1893 World Exposition that Madame describes in the book.

Stay tuned for a fuller book review and a giveaway as well!

Click here to listen to the interview with Mary Beth Raycraft.

Click here to visit the book’s official website.

And…click here to buy the book on Amazon.com.

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