Manon’s World

Manon Gropius (1916 to 1935) was the daughter of Alma Mahler, widow of Gustav Mahler, and the architect Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus. She was also the stepdaughter of the writer Franz Werfel. In Manon's World, James Reidel examines the life and death of a child who stood at the centre of a broken love triangle. Although Manon was a peripheral figure in history, the book sets her in a context that brings out how central she was to her famous parents and their circles. It uncovers a neglected and fascinating life in a vanished world: Vienna, Venice and Berlin between the wars.

The book is more than a narrative biography. It is also a medical history of the polio that killed Manon, and a personal cultural history of the hopes projected onto her and later felt as lost by sharp observers such as Elias Canetti, who gave two chapters of his Nobel Prize-winning memoirs to meeting Manon and attending her funeral. That funeral led Alban Berg to dedicate his Violin Concerto 'to an angel'.

Reidel presents a more complex picture of a young woman who wanted to be an actress and artist in her own right, even though her mother intended her as a protégée. She also inspired her father, who rarely saw her, and her stepfather Franz Werfel, who wrote her obsessively into his novels, beginning with The Forty Days of Musa Dagh and then as a revenant in every book that followed.