The Memoirs of Madame Roland: A Heroine of the French Revolution

This is a very hard book to read, when one is aware at all times that it was written by a living, breathing woman who knew she was going to be guillotined . . . and for what? For proving that a woman was as competent at the governmental level as a man. She and Olympe de Gouges terrified the revolutionaries, which in turn helped bring on Napoleon. I always cry when I get to the part where she addresses her little daughter.

While it doesn’t have the intellectual rigor of Boethius (who also wrote from prison while awaiting execution) it is a riveting look at rapidly and violently changing times as people tried, for all kinds of reasons, to summarily reinvent a culture.

Find out more about her here: Marie-Jeanne Roland de le Patiere