1962: L’Amazone bleue

by | Updated on 13/09/2024 | Published on 04/05/1962 | 1962-1973 Je voulais être une femme, Bibliographies, Youth

Hachette, coll. Bibliothèque verte n°208, 249 pages.

Françoise was very influenced by the venerable Hugo, and, in particular, his vision of the Vendée wars. This is why, while siding with the Republic, it paints a picture that is not Manichean. She also moves certain protagonists of her story from one camp to another, whose figurehead is a young woman who fights and plots, finding herself wherever the destiny of France is at stake. (Vincent)

1962: Les Plus Belles Lettres de Flaubert

by | Updated on 03/08/2024 | Published on 04/05/1962 | 1962-1973 Je voulais être une femme, Bibliographies, Literature essays

Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 1962, 158 pages.

Françoise saw in Flaubert the first of the bourgeois writers (with time and money) to have introduced what she considers to be the cardinal value of his class in literature:: investment in time (time is money).

If she doesn’t forget his misogyny and the atrocious pages he wrote against the defeated Paris Commune, she gives him credit for having devoted his time to trying to tear himself away from the mediocre thinking of his time and class (whether he succeeded is another story, editor’s note), and she distinguishes him from his contemporaries in that he was in epidermal rejection of the world (unlike Sand, Balzac, Stendhal…).

Françoise, Flaubertian? Certainly not. But she recognizes its literary merits and considers it an interesting textbook case. (Vincent)