Authors, these great erased people who have made literature is a dip in our literary heritage

Marie de France, Marguerite de Navarre, Christine de Pizan, Madeleine de Scudéry, Marie de Sévigné … Do these names mean anything to you? And for good reason! These authors, some of whom were still famous in their day, enjoying critical or public success, have simply been eclipsed by our literary history. With Authors, these great erased people who have made literature, the Hors d’accès editions are committed to bringing them out of the shadows thanks to an anthology, orchestrated by Daphné Ticrizenis. The first volume – which ranges from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century – has just been published. Brought by this brilliant feminist publishing house, to which we owe the essentials in particular Our body, ourselves, this ambitious project allows us to discover our literary heritage. And get away, in passing, from some ideas received.

The myth of an exclusively male literature

Because, as Titiou Lecoq, who precedes the book, recalls, the collective imagination kept us in the idea that women did not write in such remote periods as the Middle Ages. Nor, on the other hand, with a few rare exceptions, like Georges Sand, later, because they were impeded by their feminine condition surrounded by patriarchal society. And that their arrival on the literary scene came much later, in a linear way, following the waves of female emancipation. This idea that literature is a men’s business has been ingrained in us since school with a long list of great authors of reference – from La Fontaine to Zola, passing through Victor Hugo, Molière, Voltaire or Rabelais – almost exclusively male.

Yet women have always written, against all odds. The first written work of humanity that we have kept track of comes from a poetess, Enheduanna, who would have lived 2300 years before our era. But, as Julien Marsay deciphered in a pungent investigation that we recommend you read – Revenge of the authors (Payment)-, over the centuries women of the pen have been victims of an “institutionalized abduction” of their writings. Thanks to the work of historians and historians, on which this anthology is based, we have witnessed from the 20th^And century at the beginning of the rehabilitation of our literary heritage.

Surprisingly current texts

From the first pages of this work, which looks like a good book, with its beautiful illustrations by Marie Fré Dhal, readers are cultured. Through the diversity of the proposed works – poetry, essays, short stories, theater, novels … – which demonstrates the contribution of the authors to the different literary genres, which sometimes they even invented. But also from the amazing topicality of some of them. Think in particular of the essay by Marie de Gournay, Equality between men and women (1622) o The miseries of the married woman by Nicole Estienne (1587).

There is something that moves in walking among these fifty texts, here freed from the shadows reserved for them. Especially since beyond the aesthetic favorites of some of these works, we are also damned shaken by the destiny, courage and combativeness of their authors, whose trajectories this book recounts. Many of them have been belittled, derided, despised, even threatened, as their freedom and talent worried men or a Church determined to control them.. In June 1310 in Paris, Marguerite Porete was burned alive with her book The mirror of simple and annihilated souls. Although she was already considered a heretic, she insisted on continuing to distribute her work of hers, accused of “inviting readers to live their faith outside the Church “.

This anthology skillfully fills a real void. Far from being off-putting, it was designed to be as accessible as possible, combining excerpts from texts, illustrations, frames, small biographies. A necessary work to read, offer and share as widely as possible for our literary heritage to survive.

Authors, these great erased people who have made literatureorchestrated by Daphné Ticrizenis and preceded by Titiou Lecoq, Hors d’accès editions, 303 pages, € 26.