Word: writes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Whatever their faults, the novels have astonishing qualities. If many French women writers happily strip in public, that may be because, as 23-year-old Novelist Elisabeth Trévol puts it: "We are afraid to write a woman's book, so we try to deepen our voices. We discover how easy and amusing it is to talk of things 'taboo.' That shamelessness is a bit forced." But the majority of the women novelists, even the beginners, are sure-handed craftswomen. The best of them do not trade on their femininity, want to be judged as writers...
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...
...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...
Love & Deepened Voices. Not all French women writers are as fiercely intellectual as Simone de Beauvoir or as sensationally sexy as the kiss-and-write girls. Louise de Vilmorin, 48, author of the brilliant little tragicomic gem, Madame De (TIME, Oct. 11), writes books that are always impeccably elegant, and 47-year-old Renée Massip's La Regente is a sensitive psychological study of an unhappy girl and a domineering mother. French women writers, as diverse in personality as in subject matter, range from glamorous Silvia Monfort, 30, whose Droit Chemin is about a professor who tries...
Judging from such books, American writers are a homesick lot. Perhaps they ought to go home more often, but write about it less...