The picture must have given many a page-flipper pause. Spread across two pages of the Paris weekly Elle were the faces of 70 women. At first glance they might have been graduates of the Cordon Bleu cookery school, characters in a police line-èup, culture seekers at the Sorbonne, or simply guests at an unaccountably manless cocktail party. The truth was much more improbable. They were working novelists.
Once the role of women in French literature was limited to giving male writers something to write about. Madame de La Fayette (who in 1678 wrote the first French novel, La Princesse de Clèves), Madame de Staël, George Sand and a handful of other women did write, and very well, but they were exceptions. The greatest exception of all was Colette (1873-1954), one of the finest of all French stylists, whose women were always too good for men, but not good enough to do without them. In the path cleared by Colette, an army is now marching.
Women mothered almost one out of every three novels appearing in France last year, and delivered more than half the year's crop of early (first or second) novels.
Flesh & the Devil. Since the war more women than men have won the prestigious Prix Femina (awarded by an all-woman jury), and more than 60 novels by women were thought to have enough merit to become candidates for the major literary awards. In a class by themselves are the prizewinning historical studies—51-year-old Marguerite Yourcenar's Hadrian's Memoirs (TIME, Nov. 29) and 38-year-old Zoé Oldenbourg's The Cornerstone (TIME, Jan. 10). But, like Colette, few of the ladies write historicals or go to libraries for material. They supply their own, proving themselves much bolder practitioners of the entre-les-draps (between-the-sheets) school of literature than men.
Many of the books are written in the first person and carry with them the tang and immediacy of confessions. France's most successful novel last year was Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness), which will be published in the U.S. this month. In one season its talented, 18-year-old author, Francoise Sagan, became a celebrity, and her book's haunting title became part of the French language. Author Sagan's lucid young heroine leads a freewheeling existence on the Riviera with her freewheeling father, until one of his mistresses tries to marry him. The girl's intrigues split the couple and lead to the older woman's suicide. The book ends where the beautiful young heroine's maturity begins: "Only, when I am in my bed, at dawn, with only the noise of cars in Paris, my memory sometimes betrays me: the summer returns and all its recollections. Anne, Anne! I repeat this name very low for a very long time in the dark. Then something rises within me that I greet by its name, my eyes closed: 'Bonjour Tristesse.'"