Violette Leduc  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search

Related e

Wikipedia
Wiktionary
Shop


Featured:

Violette Leduc (April 7, 1907May 28, 1972) was a French author noted for such novels as Thérèse and Isabelle and La Bâtarde. In 1968 American director Radley Metzger made a film of Leduc's novel Thérèse and Isabelle. The film was a commercial feature about adolescent lesbian love, starring Essy Persson and Anna Gael.

Biography

She was born in Arras, Pas de Calais, France, the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl, Berthe. In Valenciennes, the young Violette spent most of her childhood suffering from poor self-esteem, exacerbated by her mother's hostility and overprotectiveness. She developed tender friendships with her grandmother Fideline and her maternal aunt Laure.

Her formal education, begun in 1913, was interrupted by World War I. After the war, she went to a boarding school, the Collège de Douai, where she experienced lesbian affairs with a classmate and a music instructor who was fired over the incident.

In 1926, Leduc moved to Paris and enrolled in the Lycée Racine. That same year, she failed her baccalaureate exam and began working as a telephone operator and secretary at Plon publishers.

In 1932 she met Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir, who encouraged her to write. Her first novel L'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin) was published by Albert Camus for Éditions Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.

Leduc's best-known book, the memoir La Bâtarde, was published in 1964. It nearly won the prestigious Prix Goncourt and quickly became a bestseller. She went on to write eight more books, including La Folie en tête (Mad in Pursuit), the second part of her literary autobiography.

In 1968 Radley Metzger made a film of Leduc's novel Thérèse and Isabelle. The film was a commercial feature about adolescent lesbian love, starring Essy Persson and Anna Gael.

Leduc developed breast cancer and died after two operations.

List of works

  • L'Asphyxie, 1945.
  • L'affamee, 1948.
  • Ravages, 1955.
  • La vieille fille et le mort, 1958.
  • Golden Buttons, 1961.
  • La Bâtarde, 1964.
  • Thérèse et Isabelle, 1966.
  • Lady and the Little Fox Fur, 1967.
  • Folie en tête, 1970.
  • Taxi, 1973.
  • Chasse à l'amour, 1972.




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Violette Leduc" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

Personal tools