| Provisional Notes |
cf. James Smith Allen, Poignant relations. Three modern French women. Baltimore, 2000: In this book, James Smith Allen analyzes the works of three nineteenth and early twentieth-century French women writers to address larger issues of feminism, literary production, and modernity. Although the three figures—Marie-Sophie Leroyer de Chantepie (1800–1888), Geneviève Bréton-Vaudoyer (1849–1918), and Céline Renooz-Muro (1840–1928)—are little known today, Allen maintains that they represent an important gesture of feminism; that is, they wrote to construct meaningful lives that included agency, independence, and a critique of social and cultural constraints on women. None of these women identified herself as a feminist, but, according to Allen, they articulated "traces of feminist consciousness" in their discursive renderings of subjects vitally important to them: namely, marital, familial, sexual, and religious or scientific relationships. (rev.art. in Ameican Hist. Review oct. 2005). |