Eve Coudert de Lancel, Delphine de Lancel Sadowski, and Marie-Frederique de Lancel Longbridge Hampton are typical Judith Krantz heroines. Spectacularly beautiful and talented, larger than life, each in her own way rejects her background of affluence and privilege, overcomes social, financial, or physical obstacles, and achieves a position of power as part of an extremely glamorous lifestyle. In short, the de Lancel women live every woman's romantic fantasy, and at age thirteen, Freddy's daughter Annie, who manifests the same daring and independence of spirit, seems poised to repeat the family pattern.

Interestingly, Krantz's less important female characters, though sometimes foolish or weak, rarely seem to be truly evil; villainy appears the almost exclusive province of dissolute male characters, and the novel's one deceitful woman, Marquise de Saint-Fraycourt, could be said to have been corrupted by her husband. Insofar as they affect the plot, the minor female characters provide...