The Courtesans – Joanna Richardson

Writer and critic Joanna Richardson was born in London. She is a founder member of the Royal Society of Literature. As a biographer Joanna Richardson has received critical attention for her life-accounts of some of nineteenth-century France's most noted writers. Included among these are her portraits of poets Paul Verlaine and Baudelaire and France's famous women of letters, Colette and Judith Gautier, for which she won the 1989 Prix Goncourt, the first non-French winner in the prize's history.