Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
Desbordes-Valmore, Marceline (1786-1859). French author of numerous volumes of poetry: Élégies, Marie et romances (1819), Élégies et poésies nouvelles (1825), Poésies (1830), Les Pleurs (1833), Pauvres fleurs (1839), Bouquets et prières (1843). She also published a number of collections of short stories and tales, some of them particularly for children. There is an early novel, L'Atelier d'un peintre (published in 1833), which is interesting both as an autobiographical text and as a depiction of the milieu of painters in the early 19th c.
Although some of her poetic qualities were recognized in her day by writers such as Baudelaire, and later by Verlaine and the Symbolists, she had in general carried a reputation as a lightweight lyrical poet. Only in relatively recent times has serious critical attention been turned to her works and their true value been acknowledged. The undervaluation of Desbordes-Valmore has certainly been in large part due to critical blind-spots, misconceptions, and prejudices concerning women's writing. She has long been thought of as having written passively and sentimentally about her tragic and often solitary personal life (unfulfilled love affair with the writer Henri de Latouche, death of her children and closest friends). What now strikes the modern reader is precisely her ability to deal with tragic experience directly and unflinchingly, never evading the pain of memory, loss, and remorse. Seen in the context of other contemporary French Romantic poets, her powers of precise observation and her ability to catch the detail of nature and everyday life are rare indeed. One is, therefore, not surprised that a modern poet such as Yves Bonnefoy, in his selected edition of her poetry (1983), has called for a complete revaluation of 19th-c. French poetic history which would accord her a central place, and which would also force a reassessment of all those supposedly more eminent (male) Romantic poets who, in their grandiose mystical and visionary projects, had so signally failed to incarnate the real world in their poems.
Few poets of any period have, in fact, succeeded like Desbordes-Valmore in finding such concrete ways of writing about the presence of the absent and the absence of the present—losing the body but still seeing the reflection, losing the voice but still hearing the echo. It is perhaps her treatment of family relationships and family affections which now seems the most important and most moving feature of her work, in those poems which nostalgically and painfully confront the fragility and unrecoverability of original patterns of loving, feeling, and belonging.
[Brian Rigby]
