All too often women's writing is described trans-historically, as though the conditions surrounding its production had been identical for all writers and at all periods. On the contrary, both the process by which a woman became a writer and the manner in which she practised her craft have varied widely from century to century and from one milieu to another.
Many kinds of factor determine the differences between the careers of any two women writers. We may take for example the cases of the comtesse de Lafayette and George Sand. The most evident discrepancies between their situations can be explained by social status or class. Because Lafayette was born into the highest rank of the nobility, she had the kind of access to the literary world otherwise inconceivable for women in her day. She had a reasonably extensive education (before the 20th c. a woman's education was almost never the equivalent of that received by a male contemporary). All her life she frequented the best-known figures on the intellectual scene, and was able to call on them for their collaboration—asking them, for example, to modify her style according to her specifications. Moreover, she enjoyed apparently complete financial and legal independence. She married early, but she and her husband soon appear to have worked out an amicable, unofficial separation.
George Sand's life for the most part stands in sharp contrast to this privileged existence. Though the woman born Aurore Dupin who became through marriage Baronne Dudevant was far from a social outsider, she was obliged to struggle to have a literary career. Her separation from her husband was hardly painless. When she arrived in Paris hoping to become a writer she was penniless. And, whereas before the end of her long career she frequented the major writers of her day, in the beginning she was an unknown, and subsequently the less important partner in her collaboration with Jules Sandeau. That she signed all her works as a man, with the pseudonym contrived for this early collaboration, says a great deal about women's writing in the 19th c.: a degree of male protection was often required before it could enter public circulation.
The comparison between Lafayette and Sand can be replicated, in earlier centuries, by that between Marie de France and Christine de Pizan. Nevertheless, it is true that until the end of the ancien régime the dominant figures in French writing are most often women of privilege. From Marie de France to the trobairitz, to Marguerite de Navarre in the 16th c., to Lafayette's contemporary the marquise de Sévigné, and to such 18th-c. novelists as the marquise de Tencin and the baronne de Staël, women whose rank gave them access to the most influential contemporary circles were also those most easily able to find a place in the Republic of Letters. Indeed, after the events of 1789 had put an end to the foundation of the system of privilege, Germaine de Staël (who supported the Revolution) remarked that it was possible that women writers in France would never again have such an easy time.
Women did indeed have a harder time becoming writers after the ancien régime, and this fact undoubtedly goes a long way towards explaining why standard paradigms are inadequate to evaluate the history of French women's writing. English-speaking critics often assume, in particular, that the example of women's writing in England is universally valid. According to this model, the history of women's writing is always that of steady progress from obscurity towards ever more public and equal status. The history of French women's writing, however, is more complicated: only in the second half of the 20th c. have women writers begun to recover the prominence they enjoyed during the last century of the ancien régime.
This renewed prominence can be explained by the fact that, in recent decades, women have finally obtained at least some form of access to all the institutions—from publishing-houses to literary academies—outside which it is impossible to have a literary career. In particular, in the second half of the 20th c., for the first time women find every aspect of the French educational system open to them. Not surprisingly, this new access has had rapid and impressive results: women are now publishing in France in record and ever-increasing numbers.
Our knowledge of the different periods in the tradition of French women's writing varies greatly. It is no surprise that we often know less about the earliest women writers. At a time when most literary composition was anonymous, the identity of many women writers was irretrievably lost and the sex of many authors is uncertain. For instance, the medieval chanson de toile is generally considered a women's genre, but in the case of anonymous lyrics such as these it is not clear what this means. Are they actual examples of women's writing or early illustrations of the phenomenon Hélène Cixous calls écriture féminine, writing that so successfully simulates a female voice that it comes to be accepted as the authentic expression of a woman's point of view? (The case of the 17th-c. novel, Lettres portugaises, is perhaps the definitive example of writing that is the perfect fulfilment of an epoch's vision of the way in which a woman should write.)
The cases in which we do have abundant information about early women writers—e.g. 16th-c. poets, notably those who worked in the circle of the dames des Roches—indicate that we know most about pre-20th-c. women writers when they worked collectively in some way. This might mean that they wrote as part of an actual literary collective, a circle or a salon whose members circulated works for mutual advice and approval. It might also mean a more informal type of collective project, instances in which women writers—e.g. Lafayette, Sévigné, and numerous lesser-known contemporaries—were conscious that they were not writing in isolation but as part of a tradition.
The surviving records of these collaborations—correspondences, journals, collective volumes—constitute the richest source of information about the changing practical conditions that facilitated or hindered the process by which women became writers. We can thus learn to understand better certain aspects of the business of literature—what a writer at a particular period was paid for a novel or how different writers dealt with readers' responses to their works. We learn about strategies women were forced to devise to deal with activities that would have been merely routine for their male counterparts—how they had recourse to intermediaries for their dealings with publishers, or what caused them to hide their identity behind male pseudonyms.
For obvious reasons, and as these records of female literary collaboration indicate, it was easier for women to become writers when they worked collaboratively. The period 1650-1780 was a golden age of French women's writing: women were not only publishing in significant numbers, but were widely viewed as innovators whose creations were changing the shape of literature. Most importantly, women such as Scudéry, Lafayette, Montpensier, and Villedieu were seen as the principal creators of a new literary form, the novel of subjective experience [see Novel, 2]. The literary world at large recognized both this unprecedented female literary presence and the sense of belonging to a tradition that these women writers shared. At least a dozen volumes appeared entirely devoted to the history of women's writing in France, several of which review the origins of that history in the Middle Ages. The most comprehensive of these studies are the five-volume Histoire littéraire des femmes françaises attributed to Joseph de La Porte (1769) and Louise de Keralio Robert's 12-volume Collection des meilleurs ouvrages français, composés par des femmes (1786-8).
If this view of French literary history, which places the accomplishments of women writers on the same footing as those of their male counterparts, had continued to be diffused, women writers might have known a very different fate in modern times. However, beginning in the mid-18th c., but particularly in the early 19th c., the history of French literature was rewritten in volumes that mark the beginning of literary history as we know it, volumes that imposed the vision of the canon of French literature that is still dominant today. Women writers were virtually excluded from this new literary history: only a few exceptional literary women were granted canonic status; all memory of the tradition of French women's writing was erased.
In recent decades we have begun to recover a sense of the true history of women writers' participation in the French tradition. That process of recovery, however, is far from complete. Our knowledge of women writers' presence in many periods, of their contribution to most genres, remains fragmentary at best. Only with continuing archival research will we obtain a truly new vision of French literary history, one in which women writers through the ages take their place alongside their male counterparts. [See Feminism.]
[Joan Dejean]
