Her posting the other day asked If You Could Go Back in Time, Whose Life Would You Choose to Live?

Judith asked this question with the idea that heroic souls might not necessarily be the answer. “The idea was pleasure not glory,” she wrote, saying she would withhold her own choice for a day to hear what viewers thought. But she gave two hints: “Literary. Pioneer.”

Viewers proved themselves quite thoughtful. They guessed The Little House on the Prairie author Laura Ingalls Wilder … Dorothy Parker … J.K. Rowling … Charlotte Bronte (though she died young) … Anne Boleyn and Marie Antoinette (though they lost their heads) … Jackie Onassis (though she died an untimely death) … Amelia Earhart (though she was lost at sea in World War II) … Jane Austin … Emily Dickinson … Madame Recamier … Georges Sand.

But Judith’s selection beat them all to pieces. She was thinking of Madame de Stael!

This woman was Swiss, made her home in France and was a writer — an intellectual, presiding as hostess over a magnificent salon of artists and deep-thinkers. Politically involved and controversial — she dared to challenge Napoleon. She did die young, at age 51. Some thought she had injured her health by “excessive study and intellectual excitement.” Five years before her death she married an army man who was 23 years her junior. (You know, intellectual excitement only counts for so much.)

Reading Judith’s answer and suffering from not having thought of it myself, I did remember suddenly a lovely anecdote. Lawrence Olivier complained bitterly to Noel Coward about Marilyn Monroe, his co-star in “The Prince and the Showgirl.” One day Noel was sitting with the wicked wit Clifton Webb at a small table which they were sharing with Marilyn. The actress, possibly picking up on Coward’s disdain, was monosyllabic.

Later, Coward would comment: “Not exactly Madame de Stael, is she?”

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