Who was Marie Nordlinger, Marcel Proust’s ‘Muse from Manchester’?
Dr Cynthia Gamble introduces us to Marie Nordlinger (1876-1961), the talented, polyglot artist and sculptor from Manchester who was in regular correspondence with Marcel Proust.
The story begins in Victoria Park, Rusholme, near (now in) Manchester, where Marie Nordlinger was born into a wealthy middle-class family. Her father, Selmar Nordlinger, originally an immigrant from Venice, was a cotton industrialist and philanthropist who espoused the Ruskinian values of work. Her mother, Hélène, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish banker, was born in Hamburg. Marie, the third of seven children, thrived in a multilingual environment, at school and at home.
After initial studies at the Municipal School of Art in Manchester, she continued learning as an artist and sculptor in Paris in the studio of Gustave Courtois, chaperoned by her aunt. She made the acquaintance of Marcel Proust at the home of her cousin Reynaldo Hahn in December 1896. Proust was immediately attracted to her, likenin her to a lady in a Titian painting in the Louvre.
This was the start of a remarkable adventure: between 1899 and 1908, she and Proust were in regular correspondence, mainly about questions of translation. Marie helped him translate two works by John Ruskin: The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies. Proust’s letters to Marie were published as Lettres à une amie (Manchester, Éditions du Calame, 1942).
Marie, known as the ‘Parisienne from Manchester’, had a pioneering spirit: she crossed continents for work and study long before women in Britain had been emancipated. She spent time as an apprentice sculptor in Hamburg, and then, in Belle Époque Paris, she was employed in the gallery of Siegfried Bing, the art dealer and disseminator of Japonisme.
Marie was so exceptional and hard-working that Bing sent her, unaccompanied, to America as his representative to negotiate contracts and also to help catalogue in Detroit the precious collection of East Asian, Middle Eastern and American art of the wealthy industrialist Charles Lang Freer.
In 1911, Marie married the German art historian Rudolf Meyer-Riefstahl, with whom she set up an antique business in central Paris. Three years later, at the time of the Great War, the couple’s assets were seized by the French state and the family took refuge in England.
A lifelong Francophile, she worked tirelessly to promote Franco-British relations and in 1957 was awarded the Légion d’honneur.
Dr Cynthia Gamble is Honorary Research Fellow of the University of Exeter and member of the Académie des Sciences, Belles-Lettres et Arts de Rouen, is the author many works about Marcel Proust and John Ruskin, in particular Voix entrelacées de Proust et de Ruskin (2021). She also had access to a private archive to publish Wenlock Abbey 1857-1919: A Shropshire Country House and the Milnes Gaskell Family (2015). She enjoys working in a Franco-British environment and was delighted to write Marie Nordlinger (1876-1961): Proust’s Muse from Manchester (2026), also based on unpublished manuscripts.
Cross Street Chapel is in central Manchester. The nearest rail station is Victoria and for the tram, it’s Exchange Square. Doors open at 1.00pm (feel free to bring a packed lunch), and our talk will begin at 1.30.
