Supplément à l'entretien : La voix des écrivaines face à l'impératif de célébrité

Violaine François; Sophie Bros

doi:10.51777/relief27614

Author(s)

Violaine François University Paris-Est Créteil
Sophie Bros University of Poitiers

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.51777/relief27614

Keywords:

literary celebrity, Austen, Desbordes-Valmore, Salm, Sand, Ségur, women writers

Abstract

Following on from the interview with Damien Zanone on the literary fame of women writers in the 19th century, this supplement does not seek to add yet another critical commentary to the existing body of criticism, but rather to give a voice to the women writers themselves. It brings together a selection of extracts drawn from the correspondence and personal writings of Amable Tastu, Victoire Babois, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Élisa Mercœur, Jane Austen, George Sand, the Countess of Ségur, and Constance de Salm, organised around six themes: the economics of writing, sisterhood among female authors, strategies of discretion, relations with critics, old age and recognition, and the difficulties of being a woman and a writer. Through these unique voices, what emerges is less a typology than a mapping of hesitations, contradictions, strategies and forms of resistance—all ways of desiring, inhabiting, or thwarting the imperative of fame.

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Author Biographies

Violaine François, University Paris-Est Créteil

Violaine François holds a PhD from Paul-Valéry University Montpellier 3. Completed in 2023, her dissertation – “Writers’ Readings in the Nineteenth Century: From Occasional Practices to Performance” – was awarded the 2024 Ary Scheffer Prize. Her research examines public and semi-public readings by nineteenth-century writers, with a particular focus on literary sociability, orality, and media and performance practices. She is currently extending this work to the study of public reading and writers’ voices – especially those of women writers – from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, with an emphasis on the role of media culture in shaping practices of literary orality. She is a PRAG (Professeure agrégée) in the Department of Literature and Language at Université Paris-Est Créteil. She has recently published the study “Sur les traces d’une entraide littéraire. Enquête sur les liens entre Élisa Mercœur et ses aînées en littérature” in the journal Thélème, as well as an article entitled “Petits genres et paroles vives : Jules Jouy, un transfuge exemplaire des petites scènes parisiennes de la fin du siècle” in Écrire en petit, jouer en mineur. Marginalités littéraires, scéniques et médiatiques (1880-1914), Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2025. Her dissertation will be published under the title Paroles d’écrivains au XIX^e siècle de M^me de Staël à Apollinaire. Pratiques, fictions, représentations by Presses universitaires de Liège.
Sophie Bros, University of Poitiers

In 2025, Sophie Bros completed a PhD thesis on the imaginary of distant lands, at the intersection of visual studies and literature, conducted at the University of Nanterre under the supervision of Matthieu Letourneux and in collaboration with the Bibliothèque nationale de France. She is currently a research and teaching assistant at the University of Poitiers, and is particularly interested in the impact of the development of new media (photography, cinema) on textual expression at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research is conducted through the lens of visual culture, and non-canonical authors.