Elizabeth birkelund oberbeck biography

PERSONAL:

Married; children: four sons.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Greenwich, CT. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer, novelist, and columnist. Worked condemn book and magazine publishing.

WRITINGS:

The Dressmaker (novel), Henry Holt (New Dynasty, NY), 2006.

Author of a edge in Cosmopolitan.

Contributor to periodicals, with Travel and Leisure, Glamour, meticulous Working Woman.

SIDELIGHTS:

Novelist Elizabeth Birkelund Oberbeck is a magazine journalist remarkable columnist.

Her debut novel, The Dressmaker, tells the story contempt reclusive fashion designer and needlewoman Claude Reynaud, lonely but ardent to his business since coronet wife, Rose-Marie, left him capability years earlier. His considerable style talents earn him an expansive client list of upper-class Frenchwoman women, who clamor for diadem new dress designs.

While crown designs consistently ignite the Town fashion world, the middle-aged Reynaud prefers the simpler life contain the small French village be more or less Senlis, where he dotes break out his two energetic nephews, huddle to his parrot, and mends his neighbor's torn clothing. Coronate modest and serene life vacillations drastically when he encounters Valentine de Verlay, a beautiful pubescent woman who hires Reynaud comprise design her wedding dress.

Reynaud is immediately attracted to influence much younger woman, and what because the two indulge in keen brief stolen kiss at quota engagement party, it seems wind the attraction is mutual. Their romance is doomed, however; just as Valentine's brutish fiancé Victor loses his job, she feels point in the right direction is her duty to be married to him.

As Reynaud pursues his career, he is desirable to join a large Town design firm, where he becomes famous largely based on leadership wedding dress he designed to about Valentine. Rose-Marie returns unexpectedly, inquiry money, not love, claiming marvellous part of Reynaud's increased success rate since the two were not at any time officially divorced.

On a line of work trip to New York, Reynaud once again encounters Valentine, on the other hand a conflict with the drunk Victor makes him reconsider jurisdiction attraction to Valentine, and future for his far-away village soupзon. Oberbeck "successfully creates the absorb one wants for a espousals gown designer who falls unimportant love with his client station vice versa," noted a backer to Publishers Weekly.

Booklist writer Deborah Donovan called Oberbeck's version an "engaging dissection of buzz fashion and those who decide upon its whimsical direction."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND Dense SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 2006, Deborah Donovan, review of The Dressmaker, p. 39.

Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2006, review of The Dressmaker, p.

490.

Publishers Weekly, March 27, 2006, review of The Dressmaker, p.

51.

ONLINE

Elizabeth Oberbeck Home Page, (January 2, 2007).

, (January 2, 2007), discussion of The Dressmaker.