7 FEMMES

Seven fascinating portraits of women who have left their indelible mark upon the literary history of the past two centuries, with emphasis on their inner lives by one of France's exceptional writers. Seven women. Seven emblematic figures of the literature to which they completely devoted their lives. Each was compelled by a passionate impulse to write, a fascination with the written word that drove some to suicide. Unusual, demanding, they drowned their personal pain in their works. Their daily lives seemed to each drab and insignificant—pushed to the extreme, as in the case of Sylvie Plath, tragic. But isn't this very «dailyness» what now marks their writing in the context of history? The history of pre-war Paris, or that of the Roaring Twenties, or the history of Stalinist Russia? How can one reinterpret a work through the very life of its author? Lydie Salvayre sets herself to the portraitist's task, much as Cioran and Sainte-Beuve so magnificently did, by choosing writers whose works influenced her own life and inspired her own works: Emily Broente (1818-1848), Colette (1873-1954), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) and Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). Disturbingly unconventional, sometimes scandalous, in their own way each tells of a world that caused her suffering, yet one she helped to shape. Now their works are literary monuments. Lydie Salvayre brings each of these women to life, writing of their lives, their beauty, their outrageousness and their rebellion, as well as their dark side, their despair. Lydie Salvayre is the author of about fifteen novels, including La Compagnie des spectres (Seuil, 1997) which was awarded the Prix Novembre and was elected «Best Book of the Year” by literary review Lire in 1997. Her novel BW (Seuil, 2009) won the Prix François Billetdoux. Her works have been translated into twenty languages and adapted for theatre or enacted as concert-readings.