Izabela Czartoryska

Izabela Czartoryska, née Flemming, was a Polish aristocrat whose long life spanned the last decades of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the partitions of Poland and the Napoleonic era. Through the Czartoryski family she stood close to political and cultural elites, travelled widely in Europe and became increasingly committed to education, collecting and the preservation of Polish historical memory.

At Puławy she created collections intended to preserve national memory after the destruction of the Polish state, including the Temple of the Sibyl. Adam Zamoyski’s Izabela the Valiant draws heavily on family archives to reconstruct her life. The book is nonfiction and treats her as its documented historical subject.