As I have just recently re-read Elizabeth Taylor’s book My Love Affair with Jewelry I decided I would do a book review of it here on White Rose of Avalon!
This book was published in 2002 and detailed Elizabeth Taylor’s iconic jewelry collection. It is a coffee table book, meaning that all of the photos are in large detail so you can see the full magnitude of the beauty! Elizabeth herself wrote many passages detailing stories of how she got the pieces and memories of events that occurred surrounding the jewelry.
It is a romantic book in many ways, especially when she is talking about the pieces gifted to her by the two great loves of her life. She makes many references to her relationships with Mike Todd and Richard Burton. Richard Burton gets several pages of anecdotes and you could tell she was still very much in love with him as she wrote these memories (even if he had passed away in 1984).
She discussed her children and how much motherhood meant to her throughout the book. Many of the lovely pictures are not simply of her incredible jewels, but also photographs of Elizabeth Taylor with her loved ones! The book serves as a visual history of Elizabeth Taylor’s life, and a book on the history of her incredible pieces. Some of her pieces were antiques, even hundreds of years old!
As a huge fan of Elizabeth Taylor, as she is one of my absolute favorite Old Hollywood Icons! She ranked number two on my list of female Old Hollywood Icons, after Jean Harlow. That was a very tough call, since I adore both of them equally, so I chose to rank the tragically young death of Jean Harlow as number one. Elizabeth Taylor was a living legend whose death I mourned greatly. I grew up with her films, and she was both larger than life, and incredibly down to earth (when you see interviews of her).
In this book we get both the down to earth woman discussing her history and her love of jewelry, and the icon showing her incredible knowledge of jewelry history and design. I highly recommend anyone with an interest in Old Hollywood, or a love of jewels, read this book! I hope you have enjoyed this short review of My Love Affair with Jewelry. Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
Note on Image: The image at the top of the post is the cover of the book. I found the image on amazon.co.uk.
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