SOURCE: Thomas, Lyn, and Emma Webb. “Writing from Experience: The Place of the Personal in French Feminist Writing.” Feminist Review 61 (spring 1999): 27-48.

INTRODUCTION

What kind of images spring to mind when French feminism is referred to? The towering, but in some eyes tarnished, figure of Simone de Beauvoir? Those women in 1968 who despite their male companions' rhetoric of equality found themselves making the coffee and typing up the minutes of the revolutionary councils? The stylish and spacious des femmes bookshop in rue de Seine, or its literary equivalent—the linguistic complexities of the very different writers grouped together under the label écriture féminine? The aim of this article is not to assess the impact of these events and personalities on the present, but to explore an area of feminist writing in France which is not part of these images, and which generally receives less attention in the anglophone world.

We will be looking at the work of two writers—Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux—who perhaps have more in common with feminist autobiographical writing published in Germany, Holland, Britain and America since the 1970s, than with the ‘feminine writing’ associated with France (see Felski, 1989). The first person writing of Ernaux and Cardinal, which in both cases is heavily based on personal experience, may be seen as slightly passé when compared with the radical linguistic and political experimentation of writers such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous or Monique Wittig. The use of the first person, and the (albeit to different degrees) publicly acknowledged links between the writer's life and her work seem to relegate Ernaux, Cardinal and others to an unfashionable backwater, a literary flashback to the 1970s which, unlike flared trousers and platform shoes, has not undergone a revival. We will be arguing that Ernaux's and Cardinal's more conventional approach to literature does not preclude them from making a significant contribution to the possibility of cultural and political change for French women, and that, on the contrary, many aspects of their work profoundly challenge both their readers' preconceptions, and the gender inequalities of French society.

In many ways we are following on from the work of Rita Felski, who has argued that ‘the reception of French feminism in the English-speaking world has been highly selective, focusing on Hélène Cixous and other proponents of l'écriture féminine to the detriment of alternative positions' (Felski, 1989: 20). We will discuss the reception of Ernaux and Cardinal, both in order to suggest reasons for the dominance and exclusions identified by Felski, and to argue for the importance of their work in terms of its accessibility and wide popularity in France, particularly with women readers. First, however, we will provide a discussion of the contemporary relevance of writing which operates predominantly, in Cardinal's case, within the conventions of autobiographical fiction and, in that of Annie Ernaux, in accordance with Lejeune's autobiographical pact (where the coincidence of name and identity of the author and narrator of the text defines the mode of reading; Lejeune, 1975). If the need to bring women's experience into literature led to a flowering of feminist autobiographies in the 1970s, to what extent does the reading and writing of personal life-histories still have a role for feminisms today?

TROUBLING TRUTHS: IDENTITY AND INTERTEXTUALITY IN THE WRITING OF ANNIE ERNAUX AND MARIE CARDINAL

Rita Felski has coined the term ‘feminist confessional’ to describe the sub-genre of autobiographical writing which presents ‘the most personal and intimate details of the author's life’ in order to create a bond between ‘female author and female reader’ (Felski, 1989: 88). For authors like Cardinal, writing the personal was seen as a political act which would empower women through the exploration of their marginal status and exclusion from public discourse. Cardinal's background as a middle-class French woman born and brought up in Algeria led to a fragmented sense of self, and to a need to write as an affirmation of her identity. This process is particularly apparent in The Words to Say It, where Cardinal employs the Bildungsroman (self-discovery novel) format and an intimate first-person narrative voice to recount the story of a woman's struggle to overcome debilitating psychological problems. The writing of her own life-history led Cardinal to a sense of sisterhood and shared gender experience, which are foregrounded in the text: the narrator achieves an autonomous identity, in part through her conversion to the feminist cause (Cardinal, 1975).¹

For Ernaux, it was the need to express and explore her own experience of class-based oppression and the losses involved in the process of changing class through education which moved her to write. If class is in many ways Ernaux's dominant theme, it is never separated from issues of gender and sexuality. In A Frozen Woman, notably, Ernaux explores the inter-relationship of these areas of oppression, in a first-person narrative focused primarily on ‘clearing the path of my development as a woman’ (Ernaux, 1981: 63). Later, in A Woman's Story, Ernaux makes the combination of political and personal motivation in her writing abundantly clear; she is concerned to bring her working-class culture of origin into literature, through the account of her mother's life: ‘My mother, born into an oppressed culture she wanted to escape from, had to become history herself so that I could feel less alone and artificial in the dominant world of words and ideas which, according to her wishes, has become mine’ (Ernaux, 1988: 106).

The growing emphasis on difference within the feminist movement, and the postcolonial and postmodern distrust of totalizing discourses have meant that writers working in this genre often come under fire for what is seen as a naïve emulation of patriarchal values and modes of communication. It is interesting to consider the extent to which Toril Moi's seminal analysis of the differences between French and Anglo/American women's writing has had the perhaps unforeseen consequence of constructing communicative writing² as the ‘other’ of feminist literature (Moi, 1985). Indeed, while Moi provides a balanced critique of the respective schools of thought, those reading the text might be tempted to exoticize the écriture in French women's writing and to oversimplify its Anglo/American counterpart as crude social realism. As Rita Felski has argued, it may be dangerous for feminists to overestimate the political potential of the disruptive textual strategies of écriture féminine. Felski reminds us that ‘there exists no obvious relation between the subversion of language structures and the processes of social struggle and change’ (Felski, 1989: 6). Making a similar point, Patricia Waugh warns against the conflation of the aesthetic and the political sphere while arguing that feminism ‘must believe in the possibility of a community of address situated in an oppositional space which can allow for the connection of the “small personal voice” (Doris Lessing's term) of one feminist to another and to other liberationist movements' (Waugh, 1992: 195). The positive response of women readers to the texts of Marie Cardinal and Annie Ernaux, discussed below, seems exemplary both of Felski's bond between reader and writer, and Waugh's ‘community of address’, suggesting that their widely read and accessible texts are far from being politically defunct.

The association of communicative literature of the type produced by Ernaux and Cardinal with naïve social documentary fails, furthermore, to take account of the transformative nature of the process of reading and writing itself. A number of critics have drawn attention to the fact that the sense of difference which marks many female writers' exploration of identity already ensures an awareness of the problematic relationship between discourse and reality, and of the constructed nature of identity. For the female autograph, who, in the words of Estelle Jelinek, has always felt herself to be ‘different from, other than, or outside the male world’, the boundary line between narrative construction and memory, representation and reality, fact and fiction has perhaps never been clearly delineated (Jelinek, 1986: 187). Molly Hite's definition of the genre as ‘a revisionary activity [which] reinscribes a prescribed subjectivity in another register [in order to] bring a somewhat different self into being’ (Hite, 1991: xv) can effectively be applied to those texts which at first hand appear to adopt more traditional approaches to narrating the self. Thus, while many readers have found it liberating to read The Words to Say It as the true story of a woman's recovery from a nervous breakdown, it is equally plausible to interpret the text as a metacommentary on the act of writing itself. The title, which implies the primary relationship between language and identity, highlights the literary nature of the work: the narrator's voyage of discovery can ultimately be read as a coming to authorship. For her, autonomous identity is confirmed when she manages to politicize her personal experience through the publication of her first book.

Although Cardinal's writing is heavily based on her own life, her continual rewriting and reinvention of her past history indicate a sophisticated understanding of the constructed nature of autobiographical narratives. Cardinal does not, in fact, base her work on the conventional autobiographical pact outlined by Philippe Lejeune as a prerequisite for the generic classification of a text as autobiography. Indeed, she has argued that her writing in the third person might be as self-revelatory as her first person narratives (Cardinal, 1977: 85). The ‘truthfulness’ of the narrative of The Words to Say It is notably called into question in the section when the narrator recounts her mother's revelation that she had tried to abort her. Cardinal opens chapter 7 by painstakingly constructing the setting of the encounter between mother and daughter. She offers the reader a host of realist details, including the date and the location of the encounter. The posture, expression and clothes of the narrator's mother are all recalled in precise detail. However, several pages on, the narrator calls the accuracy of her memory into question, confessing that: ‘In truth, this is not how it went. We were not in the living room at the farm in front of the wood fire. … We were on the slope of a very long street, the name of which I have by chance forgotten’ (Cardinal, 1975, trans. 1983: 131). Similarly, in her conversations with Annie Leclerc, Cardinal has drawn attention to the ways in which she restructured her past in order to produce a more convincing narrative. For instance, while the effect of the abortion revelation is attributed a key place in the text, this was of less significance in Cardinal's actual life (Cardinal, 1977: 28). Commenting upon the intertextual nature of Cardinal's writing, Lucille Cairns has identified a set of key actors and events which recur in various forms in many of Cardinal's texts:

A young woman, keenly alive to the sensuous beauty of her Mediterranean environment, marries early and endures exile; has children in close succession; suffers a sense of physical degeneration; falls into mental malaise and anguish; is estranged from her husband (who always departs to work in North America); takes a lover; and gradually establishes an inner balance.

(Cairns, 1992: 19)

In her study of Cardinal, Carolyn A. Durham has argued for a reading of her texts as ‘a context, the locus of the complex intersections—at once intergenderal, intertextual and interdisciplinary—of modern thought’ (Durham, 1992: 1). She proposes that Cardinal's interest both in textuality and embodied sexuality can ‘point the way’ to a ‘theoretical and textual reconciliation’ between French and Anglo/American feminisms (Durham, 1992: 11). In her more recent works Cardinal writes in the third person, and the generic description roman (novel) is displayed on the cover. In texts such as Comme si de rien n'était, which offers a fragmented and kaleidoscopic view of consumer society, and Les Jeudis de Charles et de Lula, which consists of a series of ‘conversations’ between the protagonists, experimentation with narrative voice and formal construction have become predominant (Cardinal, 1990 and 1993). By crossing the borderlines between different cultural contexts and literary genres Cardinal rejects fixed definitions of literature and of female identity itself.

A similar questioning of any simple relationship between representation and reality can be found in the intertextuality of Annie Ernaux's works. In Cleaned Out, her first novel, published in 1974, Ernaux explored the change of class which had left her with feelings of guilt, anger and uncertainty. This theme is omnipresent in her writing, though foregrounded to varying extents. It is significant that over twenty years after the publication of Cleaned Out, Ernaux has returned to an exploration of the negative emotional consequences of social mobility in La honte (Shame), published in January 1997. Inevitably, as in Cardinal's case, the constant reworking of the material of her own life implies an awareness of the impossibility of arriving at a final truth, even if at times, this seems to be the purpose, or the motivating desire, of the project. Thus in A Woman's Story, Ernaux declares herself unable to rewrite the story of her father's death, since the definitive version, or more precisely order of words, has already been sought, and found, through the writing of Positions: ‘I cannot describe those moments because I have already done so in another book, that is to say that another account, with different words, a different ordering of the sentences will never be possible’ (Ernaux, 1988: 73). Yet, in La honte, we read descriptions of hitherto concealed events in the father's shared history with his daughter, including his failed attempt on the mother's life, which triggers both the narrative and Ernaux's enduring sense of shame. In 1997 Ernaux also published ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’, a text she presents as the unedited notes she wrote during the sad months of her mother's decline, and eventual death from Alzheimer's disease.³ As she comments in the text, this publication questions the truth, or perfect order of words established in A Woman's Story, providing a more troubling and painful image of the mother, and the mother/daughter relationship:

For a long time I thought I would never publish it. Perhaps I wanted to leave a single image, a single truth—which I had tried to get close to in A Woman's Story—about my mother and my relationship with her. I now believe that the unity and coherence which a work of art results in—however strong the desire to take the most contradictory data into account—must be disrupted whenever possible.

(Ernaux, 1997b: 12)

Interestingly, Ernaux's intertextual rewriting of her past does seem to trouble and disturb her critics.⁴ However, intertextuality is not the only feature of Ernaux's writing which demonstrates her complex and sophisticated relationship to the much discussed ‘realism’ of her texts (for the latter see Holmes, 1996 and McIlvanney, 1992). Ernaux, unlike Cardinal, willingly espouses Lejeune's autobiographical pact, and indeed sees the use of the first person as fundamental to the political content of her writing: ‘I felt that the autobiographical “I” which declares itself as such was a more direct political action; it obliges the reader to take up a position in relation to the text’ (unpublished interview with Lyn Thomas, 1997). Nonetheless, the pact is simultaneously threatened and reinforced by the author's frequent interventions in the narrative to address the reader directly. On the one hand, the ‘truth’ of the autobiographical account is called into question by Ernaux's own reflections on its partial, and subjective nature; in the recent texts particularly, she depicts herself as a fully aware, postmodern subject:

For me—and perhaps for all those of my generation—whose memories are attached to a summer pop-song, a fashionable belt, to things which are destined to be ephemeral, memory brings no proof of permanence to my identity. It makes me feel, and is the confirmation of my fragmentation and my historicity.

(Ernaux, 1997a: 95-6)

Yet, at the same time, these interventions confirm the sense that there is ‘a person in the text’, and foster the reader/writer identification, which Felski sees as a specific feature of the consciousness-raising function of feminist literature. We will now turn our attention to the other essential component of Felski's model—the attentive woman reader, and to readers and readings generally, in order to explore the cultural and political places occupied by the two writers.

THE ACADEMIC RECEPTION OF FRENCH WOMEN WRITERS OUTSIDE FRANCE

An in-depth study of the academic reception of a range of French women writers is beyond the remit of this article, but certain tendencies can be observed on the basis both of our impressions as academics working in the field, and of the two main relevant bibliographical databases—the BIDS ISI service, and the Modern Languages Association International Bibliography. Taking Irigaray and Cixous as examples of writers associated with écriture féminine, and comparing them with Cardinal and Ernaux, it would seem that the former have received noticeably more attention in the anglophone academic world. The MLA database (1981-97) produced a list of sixteen articles and one book on Ernaux, all published since 1990, mainly in the US. For Cardinal, nineteen articles and two books were listed. In comparison, in the same period, the MLA listed 150 entries for Irigaray, and 226 for Cixous. Even without a detailed analysis of the nature of these publications, the numbers seem to speak for themselves. The databases are not fully comprehensive, but they do provide a clear indication that the level of anglophone academic enthusiasm for ‘feminine writing’ massively exceeds the relatively modest, and recent, interest in Ernaux and Cardinal.⁵

A further point to note is that the work on Cardinal and Ernaux takes place mainly in the French departments, and French Studies journals of American and British Universities, whereas Cixous and Irigaray also attract the attention of academics and journals in English literature, comparative literature, Women's Studies, critical theory, aesthetics and philosophy.⁶ Given the interdisciplinary nature of her work, in the case of Irigaray this is hardly surprising, particularly in relation to philosophy and ethics. However, the significant presence of some French women writers, and almost total absence of others from published work and curricula in English literature and Women's Studies does require some interrogation. During the 1980s two key texts appeared with the express aim of introducing French feminist writing to the anglophone reader: Ernaux and Cardinal are significantly absent from these influential studies (Marks and de Courtivron, 1981; Moi, 1985). In the 1990s, Cardinal and Ernaux have been included in general works, such as Atack and Powrie's Contemporary French Fiction by Women, whose aim—to correct the ‘imbalance in the attention devoted to French feminist literary theory at the expense of fiction’—bears some similarity to our own (Atack and Powrie, 1990: 1). In 1991, both writers were included in a work entitled Language and Sexual Difference: Feminist Writing in France (Sellers, 1991). However, as its title suggests, this survey is dominated by the theories and main proponents of ‘feminine writing’. Cardinal is discussed mainly in relation to her approach to language, and in the brief section on Ernaux, social class is not mentioned (Sellers, 1991). More recently, two introductions to French women's writing designed for the English-speaking reader have been published in feminist series (Fallaize, 1993; Holmes, 1996). Fallaize, who concentrates on the contemporary period, included both writers, whereas Holmes, who covers the period 1848-1994, has a part chapter on Ernaux. It may be that these texts represent the beginning of a turning point in the anglophone reception of French women's writing, albeit led by academics working in French departments. Nonetheless, it seems that the fascination with ‘feminine writing’ as exotic ‘other’ is still dominant, and that for academic anglophone feminisms, the theoretical, not the personal, is political in the 1980s and 1990s.

THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF ERNAUX AND CARDINAL IN FRANCE

The interest in writers such as Cixous and Irigaray which is so noticeable in the anglophone academic world is arguably rather less in evidence in France. In recent years, for instance, Irigaray has found a more receptive audience for her ideas among Italian feminists; Whitford argues that Holland and Italy are the European countries most interested in her work as a philosopher (Whitford, 1991). In general, women writers in France are less published and less recognized than women writers in the US and UK (Fallaize, 1993: 20-1). Perhaps in part (though only in part) because of the refusal of some of its protagonists to fight for equality, feminism has had less influence in France, both in terms of mainstream publishing, and academia. Thus, despite the dominance of écriture féminine in the anglophone view of French feminism discussed above, Ernaux and Cardinal still receive more academic attention in the French departments of American, Canadian and British universities than in France, where in both cases, the struggle to be taken seriously as writers is still an issue in the 1990s. Although here we are clearly not able to provide a comprehensive survey of the reception of these two writers in France (for Ernaux, see Thomas, 1999), we aim to highlight the most salient features, and to bring out the contrast between their popular success and the struggle for literary status.

The amount of published academic work on Ernaux in France is limited in comparison with the small but growing corpus of scholarly articles published in American and British French Studies journals. Although there are two books in French on her work as a whole, one was published in Holland (Tondeur, 1996) and the other by a fairly small and little-known publishing house based in Monaco (Fernandez-Récatala, 1994). Nonetheless, Ernaux is increasingly referred to in anthologies, and her works are studied in universities and schools. The brevity, plain style, and subject matter of texts such as Positions and A Woman's Story have ensured their popularity as set texts, which in turn has led to the publication of scholarly editions and critical commentaries in Britain and France (see for example Wether-ill, 1987 and Savéan, 1997). Ernaux comments that the interest in her work in schools is linked to the dominant theme of her writing: the painful process of changing class through education—a process experienced by many secondary level teachers, and equally relevant to pupils (unpublished interview with Lyn Thomas, March 1997). Also, according to Ernaux, there is an increasing amount of unpublished work on her writing, consisting mainly of MA theses. Perhaps the highpoint of Ernaux's literary recognition in France, apart from the initial acceptance of her first novel by Gallimard, one of France's most prestigious publishing houses, was the Prix Renaudot which she won in 1984 for Positions.

Despite these signs of acceptance by the literary and academic establishment, the French sociologist Isabelle Charpentier argues that ‘the guarantors of the literary value of the work of A. Ernaux are more fragile than it appears’ (Charpentier, 1994: 48). She goes on to describe how the publication in 1992 of Passion Perfect, an account of an affair with a younger, married man, enabled many journalists to express their repressed hostility to Ernaux, and to devalue not only Passion Perfect, but the earlier works, which had generally been well received. The recurrence of the word impudique (immodest, indecent) in reviews of Passion Perfect and some of Ernaux's more recent publications is particularly significant, indicating both the low prestige attributed to writing based on personal experience, and the gendered nature of the response to a woman writer, who is subjected to particular notions of propriety in French culture. The book shocked reviewers on a number of counts—but the fact that a ‘respectable’ woman writer and teacher had depicted herself in the throes of an intensely sexual passion was considered particularly scandalous, indicating the very different moral standards applied to men and women in French culture.

Charpentier carefully documents the explosion of negativity which Passion Perfect triggered among Ernaux's male critics, of all political persuasions. One of the most striking examples of this radically negative response is the article published in the left of centre Le Nouvel Observateur, entitled ‘A big trauma. Or how in Passion Perfect Annie Ernaux fancies herself as Emma Bovary's great niece’. Jean-François Josselin expresses his disdain by referring to Ernaux throughout as ‘la petite Annie’, refusing to attribute any literary value to the work—which he describes as ‘sad and banal’, ‘a tiny bit obscene’—and consistently trivializing the emotions expressed. Perhaps the key to it all is his total horror at Ernaux's inclusion of a popular culture version of ‘femininity’ which has no place in the French literary canon: ‘She buys underwear sets, watches soap opera, and has a little cry when Sylvie Vartan sings the superb “C'est fatal, animal”’ (Josselin, 1992: 87). Josselin's article is perhaps the most extreme, but the comparison with Emma Bovary is found elsewhere in the journalistic writing on Ernaux, as is the derogatory tone (de Biaisi, 1992; Delbourg, 1997). This linking of a woman writer with a male novelist's female character is indicative of the difficulty in French culture of seeing women as writing subjects, rather than objects of the male gaze, or textual mastery (see also Thomas, 1999: ch. 6).

Meanwhile, as Charpentier remarks, women journalists, both in the mainstream press, and in women's magazines, produced almost entirely positive reviews of Passion Perfect. The fact that Ernaux's slim volume instigated a gender-based querelle in the French press is in itself significant. The writer and journalist Jacqueline Dana commented in L'Evénement du Jeudi, for instance: ‘this way of depicting the signs of love, with precision and distance, has never been attempted before by a woman’ (Dana, 1992, quoted in Charpentier, 1994: 53). In Le Monde Josyane Savigneau defended Ernaux against Josselin's attack in an article entitled—‘Le courage d'Annie Ernaux’. Significantly, Savigneau sees Ernaux's text as breaking both a literary and a social mould, in its unadorned and frank use of the first person. She comments on a passage where Ernaux describes her indifference to her grown-up children at the height of her passion:

The masculine desire to stereotype women is out of luck here: Annie Ernaux is at the opposite end of the spectrum to Emma Bovary. In her work there is no guilt, and that's what is disturbing. No hysteria, no theatre. Just a commitment to write the truth about her passion, even when it shocks the common-sense view. … Is a woman entitled to write like this?

(Savigneau, 1992: 23)

The recent publication of the short text, ‘Fragments around Philippe V.’ (translated in this volume) suggests that Ernaux has every intention of continuing to ‘write like this’, and that she has not been intimidated by her critics. ‘Fragments’ is a detailed description of the social and physical nuances of a sexual encounter with a much younger man. The use of realist codes in this account of an older woman's sexual experience seems in some ways more troubling than the playful linguistic abstractions of feminine writing, which are safely contained within the category of the avant-garde. Here, the realistic description, for example of the pub in rue Monsieur-le-Prince, makes the introduction (and one could argue, celebration) of the ultimate taboo—menstrual blood—later in the text even more disturbing. Similarly, the image of the powerful older woman/writer may be more threatening when she is depicted as existing in contemporary social reality, rather than a feminist utopia. This publication has led, indirectly, to a further unleashing of critical fury. When the young man referred to in ‘Fragments’ (Philippe Vilain) published a novel based on his version of the relationship with Ernaux in 1997, Le Nouvel Observateur published an article which was vitriolic, not only about Vilain's text, but also about Ernaux's sexual mores (Garcin, 1997b).

As with Annie Ernaux, the critical response to Marie Cardinal in France is incommensurate with her popular appeal as a writer. In fact, Colette Hall's analysis of Cardinal's works (published in Holland by Rodopi in 1994) is the only full-scale criticism written in the French language. Despite the fact that reviews of her work are generally favourable, and that Nobel prize winner Toni Morrison has cited Cardinal as one of her major influences, Cardinal has failed to be included in the French canon as a writer of ‘serious’ literature (Lévy, 1994). Lucille Cairns has offered a plausible explanation for this, arguing that ‘neither her theory nor her praxis are assimilable to avant-garde trends of the last three decades’ (Cairns, 1992: 1). This analysis would seem to be borne out by the fact that Cardinal herself has commented negatively on the hermetic nature of some French theoretical writing (Cardinal, 1977: 82-97). Although in the past Cardinal was active in the Parisian literary scene, more recently she has adopted a more peripheral position, both textually and geographically (she moved from the French capital to Montreal, Canada in 1984 and now divides her time between Canada and the South of France). Thus a recent work, Les Jeudis de Charles et de Lula has received little attention from Parisian critics (Lévy, 1993: 12). Indeed, Cardinal has recounted how the press officer at her publishers Grasset et Fasquelle forewarned her that the novel would not excite a great deal of critical interest in Paris because of her currently peripheral relationship to the Parisian mouvement—a term which for Cardinal herself remains couched in mystery (Lévy, 1994: 152).

It is true that Cardinal has received two prestigious literary prizes: her debut novel Ecoutez la mer (1962) won the Prix international du premier roman and The Words to Say It (1975) was awarded the Prix Littré for the best medical novel; however, as the nature of the latter prize indicates, her work has found an audience primarily as a source of sociological study rather than as the material for literary analysis. Commenting on the reception of The Words to Say It Cardinal has drawn attention to the tendency for critics to deny her creative ability, preferring to classify the text as a testimony or document on psychoanalysis. Following this pattern, one reviewer seems determined to unmask the author as an impostor: ‘This is the background to a work dishonestly described as a novel—are such deceptions a necessary part of the negotiation?’ (Schulmann, 1995: 943). More positively, if in the same vein, Jean-Jacques Brochier commented that ‘it is the best account of healing I have read since Freud’ (Brochier 1975: 51). Cardinal has proposed that the tendency to read women's writing as ‘merely’ autobiographical is part of a self-protective response on the part of male critics who, in her opinion, refuse to accept that female difference can be inscribed within the esoteric domain of Literature (Royer, 1978).

While critics may gain a sense of empowerment through reading her texts as an unmediated transcription of her life, it appears that Cardinal's descriptions of the female body are quite simply too direct, too real: ‘One time the blood had flowed in such large clots that it might have been said that I was producing slices of liver’ (Cardinal, 1975, trans. 1983: 31). Interestingly, the critics themselves often express their sense of shock in the hyperbolic terms which they find offensive in Cardinal's novel. Marlon Renard, a critic writing in a specialized literary journal, highlights this aspect of the text, describing the narrator as ‘this young woman, mother of three babies, whose rebellious womb bleeds interminably’ (Renard, 1975: 10). For Madeleine Chapsal of L'Express: ‘the novel retains a revolting odour of uterine blood’ (Chapsal, 1975: 44). Even a women's magazine, Marie-France, saw fit to warn readers that it would be hard to avoid being disgusted by Cardinal's descriptions of her menstrual flow (Hamel, 1975). Cardinal's refusal to disguise her embodied experience in academic, technical or elliptical language belies many of the conventions of ‘taste’ and ‘intellectualism’ which are rigorously enforced within the French literary milieu. Indeed, as Pierre Bourdieu has pointed out, the refinement of language and taste, and the subordination of the body to a culture of abstraction are the markers of French high culture (Bourdieu, 1979: 32). Cardinal's reclamation of crude lexis is all the more disarming because it deconstructs many of the unspoken expectations about what a woman should and should not say.

As is the case for Ernaux, the word impudique as a description of Cardinal's literary style appeared regularly in reviews of The Words to Say It, though the connotations were often more positive; given the desire to classify Cardinal's text as medical evidence, her lack of ‘pudeur’ (modesty) can become an attribute, as in this review, published, significantly, in Psychologie: ‘It's not the first time that a writer has tried to make us understand the process of psychoanalysis; but the sincerity of Marie Cardinal's account, which is without shame or concessions, is the closest to achieving this goal’ (Mouareau, 1975: 66). However, it would seem that ‘immodesty’ is a less positive recommendation in the literary world; Cardinal's direct approach to writing the body appears to have played a role in the exclusion of The Words to Say It from the shortlist for the prestigious Prix Goncourt. Cardinal has argued that her description of the taboo subject of menstruation counted against her: ‘The same book with a prostate problem instead of uterine haemorrhaging would have been accepted’ (Spirlet, 1975). As this quotation suggests, Cardinal's rebellious reactions to the French literary establishment reinforce the challenge implicit in the text itself. The troubled tones of the critics, and the difficulty of classifying the work are a testimony to the strength and political significance of her writing.

THE POPULAR RECEPTION OF ERNAUX AND CARDINAL

One of the most striking features of the reception of Ernaux and Cardinal is the very large readerships which their works attract. We do not, on the whole, see the works of Irigaray or Cixous in the best-seller lists of the mainstream French press; this, on the contrary, is very much a feature of the response to Cardinal and Ernaux. Within weeks of its publication in January 1997 Ernaux's La honte was near the top of the lists in magazines and newspapers as diverse as Elle, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Point, L'Express and Aujourd'hui Le Parisien. By February, Marie-Françoise Leclère in Le Point spoke of the book's sales as an ‘astonishing result’, and by April, 68,000 copies had been sold (Leclère, 1997: 94; Gallimard, 1997). The sales figures for some of the earlier works are even more striking: to date nearly 460,000 copies of La place (Positions) have been sold in France, whilst the figure for Passion simple (Passion Perfect) is almost 275,000 copies. The significance of these statistics is reinforced by the fact that particularly since 1984, each of Ernaux's publications has been followed by invitations to appear on radio and TV, including the prestigious television discussion programme Apostrophes (now entitled Bouillon de Culture) as well as more popular TV programmes, often aimed at a female audience.

Similarly, Cardinal is a public celebrity in France. Several of her texts have achieved best-seller status while The Words to Say It has now sold over 2,500,000 copies world-wide and has been translated into eighteen different languages. As Carolyn A. Durham has pointed out, the immense popularity and enormous sales of The Words to Say It place it alongside Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Beauvoir's Le Deuxième Sexe (The Second Sex, 1949) ‘as one of the most influential texts of contemporary feminism’ (Durham, 1995, viii). Cardinal has also become a popular figure in the French media; books such as The Key in the Door, The Words to Say It, and Devotion and Disorder, some of Cardinal's most controversial works, all based on her own life, have been the subject of interviews on radio and television and in women's magazines such as Elle (Cardinal, 1972, 1975, 1987). She appeared in around seventy television programmes between 1963 and 1993, ranging from serious literary debates such as Apostrophes, to light-hearted game shows such as Questions pour un Champion.

The mass appeal of Cardinal's texts is reflected in the vast amount of mail which she receives from readers who are keen to relate the act of reading to their life-histories. The fact that the reader response to Cardinal's texts is of interest to journalists is in itself significant, and it is this secondary literature which forms the basis of the remarks which follow. Although Cardinal has produced a number of impressive works since 1975, it is The Words to Say It which still commands the greatest popular response. Cardinal has explained that initially she received 200 letters a day, and that she still receives dozens of letters referring to this earlier text (Delay, 1975-6; Boncenne et al., 1982). The specifically feminist content of the text seems to be confirmed by the fact that particularly at the time of its publication most of the letters received were from women readers. However, its universal appeal as a story of liberation is highlighted by the significant number of responses which the author received from young male readers mainly after the text's appearance in paperback (Bosselet, 1977).

Many readers feel a close affinity with Cardinal and hence use the affectionate second person singular ‘tu’ or address her as ‘Marie’. Cardinal is praised for her courage and honesty as well as for her perceptiveness and capacity to convey a ‘truth’ which strikes a chord with many readers. One reader confides: ‘Marie, I don't know if you will get this letter. Your books have overwhelmed me: it's strong, it's good, it's true’ (Boncenne et al., 1982: 24). Another expresses the view that: ‘it took courage and talent to tell this long story of “the thing”, that all-invading madness’. The majority of readers see Cardinal as a kind of agony aunt in whom they place complete trust, divulging their own intimate testimonies and pouring out their personal problems: ‘Marie, I have a slight sexual problem …’ (Boncenne et al., 1982: 24). The interaction between analyst and analysand which was positively evoked in The Words to Say It is re-enacted through the relationship between author and reader. In many cases readers recount past histories which are not dissimilar to Cardinal's own, hoping to share in some of the strength and intelligence which enabled her to work through her own crisis. For instance, an article in Le Monde gives an illuminating account of the kind of narrative which the text inspires. In this piece, entitled ‘The Plain Woman’, Jane Hervé describes her encounter with Yvette, who is sitting on a bench immersed in The Words to Say It (Hervé, 1978). Like the heroine of Cardinal's text, Yvette has experienced a profound sense of social alienation and rejection by her peers and is driven by ‘an ardent desire to be loved’. Mistaken as a witch by young children, heavily built with a long nose and thin lips, Yvette's unfashionable dress and worn-out shoes testify to her inability to conform to the stringent aesthetic norms of French femininity. Again, like the heroine of The Words to Say It, she has managed to transcend a loveless relationship with her parents and to realize her autonomous identity through professional achievement. The content of the letters is repetitive, focusing, like this article, on the narrator's problems and subsequent salvation. The Bildungsroman structure of Cardinal's narrative is thus transferred to personal life-histories, with a resulting sense of inspiration and empowerment. Perhaps most importantly, The Words to Say It seems to have inspired in its women readers a belief in their ability to bring about change in their own lives.

Ernaux also receives very large numbers of letters from male and female readers, from a range of age-groups and social class backgrounds (for a more detailed discussion, see Thomas, 1999: ch. 5). The title and subject matter of the text often has a determining effect on the profile of the readers, and a significant number of letters recount a similar social trajectory to Ernaux's own, identifying with the emotional costs and consequences which she describes. Although Ernaux's texts do not end on the triumphant note which concludes The Words to Say It, the feeling of empowerment generated by the recognition of experiences of oppression is also found in readers' letters. Thus, a woman of working-class origins, and of Ernaux's generation, who has become a doctor describes Ernaux's work as crucial in her understanding of herself, and of her feelings of alienation and isolation:

However, it was Cleaned Out which affected me the most, since for the first time, actually, despite the fact that I read a lot, I saw situations and feelings described which I thought I was alone in experiencing, and which weighed heavily in my life, and still do.

(F., aged 50; 12/9/88)

Certain texts are particularly powerful for women readers: A Woman's Story and ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ attracted a high percentage of letters from women (80 per cent and 60 per cent respectively), perhaps because of the focus on the mother/daughter relationship which, as Irigaray has argued, is not widely represented in Western patriarchal culture (Irigaray, 1989). Of particular importance generally is the notion that Ernaux has expressed a hitherto unavowed experience, and that, through reading her, the women concerned have found a voice. Thus, a number of readers repeat Ernaux's words in order to express their own grief, or anticipated loss:

My parents are very old, but still alive … but I know that when they die, I will also have lost—if I may use your moving phrase—‘the last link’ or at least the strongest ‘with my world I came from’.

(F., aged 45, teacher; 8/2/88)

One woman even constructs a brief narrative of her life, based on the title of Ernaux's third book, A Frozen Woman: ‘A woman transfixed (figée) at twenty, not quite thawed out (dégelée) by forty’ (F., aged 50; 12/4/88).

As is the case for Cardinal, a striking aspect of Ernaux's letters from women is the desire to see her as a friend. Some women readers address her as Annie, and use the familiar ‘tu’ form; many others invite her—to dinner, lunch, or even for a holiday. One woman provides an idyllic vision of a sisterly chat with Ernaux: ‘Another, less rational motive: the desire to talk with you, about life, death, writing, oblivion, whilst striding along paths through mountains, the thyme-scented scrubland of the south, or by the sea’ (F. aged 57; 5/3/97). Again like Cardinal, Ernaux becomes a role-model and an inspiration:

This book [Passion Perfect] was my bible for many months, I dragged it about with me, everywhere. It was in my bag and my memory. Your book was my guiding light in my destructive relationship with a man. You were my model, I admired you for being able to face the final break-up.

(F., aged 26)

However, there is sometimes a desire to give, as well as receive support; Ernaux's readers often write angrily in her defence against the critics: ‘These reviews [of Passion Perfect] were absolutely disgraceful, the fact that they were written by men says it all. … They don't like truth, and for them sexuality does not exist in women’ (F., retired primary schoolteacher; 5/3/92). Although it is only possible here to provide a glimpse of the responses to Ernaux's texts, it will be clear from these few examples that a strong sense of gender and/or class-based solidarity emerges in these letters.

In conclusion, it would seem that despite very great differences of social background, and of style and content in their work, Ernaux and Cardinal currently occupy a similarly ambivalent place in French culture. They are both highly popular writers: the enthusiasm and loyalty of their readerships is resistant to critical opprobrium from the literary establishment, and seems strongly linked to each writer's willingness to draw on her own experience in her writing. The fact that this is an experience of oppression, whether as a middle-class, Catholic woman in Cardinal's case, or in terms of Ernaux's working-class origins, is important for many readers, who identify with the cultural and social exclusions described. Particularly for women readers, in a culture where the naming of women's physical and sexual experiences leads to accusations of impudeur (shamelessness), Ernaux's and Cardinal's texts represent a crucial questioning of gender-differentiated conventions. The fact that both writers break the rules and speak the unspeakable—in a literary form which is widely comprehensible and accessible—seems to give many women readers the sense that they too can find the words to express their experience, and that they are entitled to do so.

Despite their own distrust of Parisian intellectualism, and choice to live and work on the periphery (albeit more recently in Cardinal's case), Ernaux and Cardinal are in fact high-profile figures in the French media. The public fascination with these writers can in part be attributed to the fact that both, in different ways, call into question conventional definitions of both the literary, and of femininity. Their use of direct, unadorned language, and reference to their own personal experience makes them a still more troubling presence in contemporary French culture. Ironically, their popularity seems to result in an ambivalent response from the French literary establishment, whose view of women writers still seems to reflect the comment made, sadly, by Beauvoir herself in 1949:

she (the woman writer) brings into literature just that personal note which is expected of her: she reminds us that she is a woman by a few airs and graces, a bit of well-chosen preciousness; thus she will excel in the production of best-sellers, but one cannot count on her to venture into unknown territory.

(Beauvoir, 1949: 633)

The dichotomies inherent in this passage, between popularity and intellectual curiosity, and between the personal and literary value, have been compounded in the anglophone academic world by its fascination with French theory. Ernaux's discussion of social class, and both writers' emphasis on communication with a wide audience seem to have excluded them from the anglophone definition of fashionable French feminisms. The signs are that this is changing; perhaps in the next century recognition of difference will not be confined to the academically à la mode.

Notes

1. The quotations and page references for Les Mots pour le dire are from the published translation (The Words to Say It). All other translations from French texts are the authors' own, and page references are to the original French texts.

2. In her discussion of Cardinal, Carolyn A. Durham coins the term ‘communicative’ literature to describe writing which attempts to speak more directly to an audience than the avant-garde text, and is more concerned with the depiction of social reality (Durham, 1992).

3. ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’—‘My night is not over’. These were the last words which Ernaux saw her mother write, in a letter to a friend. The use of the mother's words as the title of one of her books is a further example of Ernaux's desire to save her mother and her culture from oblivion—whether through social relegation, or illness and death.

   An important intertext both to ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ and A Woman's Story is Beauvoir's Une mort très douce. This work also focuses on the mother's final illness, and the impact of this on the daughter's own identity, and fear of death.

4. For instance, Le Figaro comments on the return to the mother's final months and illness in ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ that ‘what was exorcism has become exhibitionism’ (Matignon 1997). Whilst for Jérôme Garcin in Le Nouvel Observateur, Ernaux has transformed ‘this final song of love into an obscene description of physical degradation’ (Garcin, 1997a).

5. On the BIDS database, seventy-seven items were listed for Irigaray, and of these twenty-five were substantive articles, published in the US, UK and Australia (most of the remaining references to each author in the BIDS listings were book reviews). In comparison, a similar search for Ernaux produced a list of only thirty-four items, of which seven were articles, published in the US or UK. The case of Cixous adds further confirmation, since the BIDS database provided 134 references for this writer, of which thirty-nine were articles or books.

6. Ernaux and Cardinal are receiving increasing attention in French Studies in America and the UK, both in terms of published work and presence in the curriculum. All of the publications on Ernaux are in French Studies journals or books, and many are written in French. This is slightly less the case for Cardinal: two articles were published in an interdisciplinary and international literature journal, respectively, and a psychoanalytical reading of The Words to Say It in a critical theory journal (Bond 1994; Elliot, 1987; Powrie, 1989). Cardinal has also been discussed in general works on autobiography by women (Felski, 1989; Morgan et al. (eds) 1991).

Lyn Thomas is Senior Lecturer in French at the University of North London and has just completed a book on Ernaux which is to be published by Berg in 1999—Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience. She also researches and writes on contemporary French and British media.

Emma Webb is writing a Ph.D. thesis on the life-writing of Marie Cardinal and Annie Leclerc. She is a Visiting Lecturer in French at the University of North London.

Works Cited

Cited Works by Marie Cardinal

(1962) Ecoutez la mer, Paris: Editions Julliard.

(1972) La Clé sur la porte, Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle.

(1975) Les Mots pour le dire, Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, translated 1983 as The Words to Say It by Pat Goodheart, London: The Women's Press:

(1977) Autrement dit, Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, translated 1995 as In Other Words by Amy Cooper, with a foreword by Carolyn Durham and a postscript by Annie Leclerc, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

(1987) Les grands désordres, Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle, translated 1991 as Devotion and Disorder by Karen Montin, London: The Women's Press.

(1990) Comme si de rien n'était, Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle.

(1993) Les Jeudis de Charles et de Lula, Paris: Editions Grasset et Fasquelle.

Cited Works by Annie Ernaux

(1974) Les armoires vides, Paris: Gallimard, translated 1990 as Cleaned Out by Carol Sanders, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press.

(1981) La femme gelée, Paris: Gallimard, translated 1995 as A Frozen Woman by Linda Coverdale, New York: Four Walls Eight Windows (now Seven Stories Press).

(1984) La place, Paris: Gallimard, translated 1991 as Positions by Tanya Leslie, London: Quartet Books and 1992, A Man's Place, New York: Seven Stories Press.

(1988) Une femme, Paris: Gallimard, translated 1990 as A Woman's Story by Tanya Leslie, London: Quartet Books, and New York: Seven Stories Press.

(1992) Passion simple, Paris: Gallimard, translated 1993 as Passion Perfect by Tanya Leslie, London: Quartet Books, and 1993 as Simple Passion, New York: Seven Stories Press.

(1996) ‘Fragments autour de Philippe V.’, L'Infini, 56, Winter: 25-6, translated 1999 as ‘Fragments around Philippe V.’, by Lyn Thomas, in this volume.

(1997a) La honte, Paris: Gallimard (not translated).

(1997b) ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’, Paris: Gallimard (not translated).

General

Atack, Margaret and Powrie, Phil (1990) editors, Contemporary French Fiction by Women: Feminist Perspectives, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Beauvoir, Simone de (1949) Le Deuxième Sexe, Paris: Gallimard.

———. (1964) Une mort très douce, Paris: Gallimard.

Boncenne, Pierre, Brasez, Edouard, De La Forest, Marie and Rogues, Christian (1982) ‘Lettres reçues par les écrivains’ Lire, April: 24.

Bond, David (1994) ‘Marie Cardinal's Comme si de rien n'était: Language and Violence’ International-Fiction-Review, 21, 1-2: 68-75.

Bosselet, Dominique (1977) ‘Maintenant Marie Cardinal reçoit des lettres d'hommes’ Le Matin de Paris, 24 February.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1979) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit; translated by Richard Nice (1984), London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Brochier, Jean-Jacques (1975) ‘Les Mots pour le dire par Marie Cardinal’ Le Magazine Littéraire, July: 51-3.

Cairns, Lucille (1992) Marie Cardinal: Motherhood and Creativity, Glasgow: University of Glasgow French and German Publications.

Chapsal, Madeleine (1975) ‘Deux femmes sur le divan’ L'Express, 9 June: 44-5.

Charpentier, Isabelle (1994) ‘De corps à corps: réceptions croisées d'Annie Ernaux’ Politix, 27: 45-75.

De Biasi, Pierre-Marc (1992) ‘Les petites Emma 1992’ Le Magazine Littéraire, July/August: 59-62.

Delay, Claude (1975-6) ‘Une femme bien dans sa peau’ Vogue, Autumn-Winter: 94-5.

Delbourg, Patrice (1997) ‘Annie Ernaux: le bovarysme est un humanisme’ L'Evénement du Jeudi, 23-29 January: 82.

Durham, Carolyn A. (1992) The Contexture of Feminism: Marie Cardinal and Multicultural Literacy, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

———. (1995) Foreword to In Other Words translated by Amy Cooper, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Elliot, Patricia (1987) ‘In the Eye of Abjection: Marie Cardinal's The Words to Say It’ Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, Fall, 20, 4: 71-81.

Fallaize, Elizabeth (1993) French Women's Writing: Recent Fiction, London: Macmillan.

Felski, Rita (1989) Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, Hutchinson Radius.

Fernandez-Récatala, Dominique (1994) Annie Ernaux, Monaco: Editions du Rocher.

Friedan, Betty (1963) The Feminine Mystique, New York: Dell.

Gallimard (1997) Unpublished summary sheet, April 1997.

Garcin, Jérôme (1997a) ‘La haine du style’ Le Nouvel Observateur, 16-22 January: 63.

———. (1997b) ‘Pour l'amour d'Annie Ernaux: Passion simple, suite’ Le Nouvel Observateur, 6-12 November: 126.

Hall, Colette (1994) Marie Cardinal, Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi.

Hamel, Thérèse (1975) Review of Les Mots pour le Dire, Marie-France, September.

Herve, Jane (1978) ‘La femme laide’ Le Monde, 31 December.

Hite, Molly (1991) ‘Introduction’ in Morgan et al. (1991).

Holmes, Diana (1996) French Women's Writing: 1848-1994, London: Athlone Press.

———. (1996) ‘Feminism and Realism: Christiane Rochefort and Annie Ernaux’ in Holmes (1996): 246-65.

Irigaray, Luce (1989) Le Temps de la Différence: pour une révolution pacifique, Paris: Librairie générale française.

Jelinek, Estelle (1986) The Tradition of Women's Autobiography from Antiquity to the Present, Boston: Twayne Publishers.

Josselin, Jean-François (1992) ‘Un gros chagrin’ Le Nouvel Observateur, 9-15 January: 87.

Leclere, Marie-France (1997) ‘Majuscules’ Le Point, 7 February: 94.

Lejeune, Philippe (1975) Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Levy, Bernard-Henri (1993) ‘Le bloc-notes de Bernard-Henri Lévy’ Le Point, 1101, 23 October: 12.

———. (1994) ‘Ecrivain par effraction’ La Règle du jeu, 5me année, 12: 150-8.

McIlvanney, Siobhán (1992) ‘Ernaux and Realism: Redressing the Balance’ in Maggie Allison (1992) editor, Women's Space and Identity, Women Teaching French Papers, 2, Bradford: Department of Modern Languages, University of Bradford, pp. 49-63.

Marks, Elaine and De Courtivron, Isabelle (1981) editors, New French Feminisms: An Anthology, Brighton: The Harvester Press.

Matignon, R. (1997) ‘Annie Ernaux: l'arrière-cuisine de l'enfance’ Le Figaro, 16 January: 33.

Moi, Toril (1985) Sexual-Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory, London: Methuen.

Morgan, Janice, Hall, Colette, Snyder, Carol and Hite, Molly (1991) editors, Gender and Genre in Literature: Redefining Autobiography in Twentieth-Century Women's Fiction: An Essay Collection, New York and London: Garland.

Mouareau, Marie-José (1975) ‘Un grand roman’ Psychologie, October: 66-7.

Powrie, Phil (1989) ‘A Womb of One's Own: The Metaphor of the Womb-Room as a Reading-Effect in Texts by Contemporary French Women Writers’ Paragraph, November 12, 3: 197-213.

Renard, Marlon (1975) Review of Les Mots pour le dire La Quinzaine Littéraire, 16-30 June: 10.

Royer, Jean (1978) ‘Marie Cardinal: pour une autre humanité’ Le Devoir, 23 June.

Savean, Marie-France (1997) ‘Dossier: La place’, Paris: Gallimard.

Savigneau, Josyane (1992) ‘Le courage d'Annie Ernaux’ Le Monde, 17 January: 23.

Schulmann, Fernande (1995) ‘Marie Cardinal: Les Mots pour le dire’ Esprit, December: 942-3.

Sellers, Susan (1991) Language and Sexual Difference, London: Macmillan.

Spirlet, Jean-Pierre (1975) ‘Marie Cardinal: les Goncourts sont misogynes’ Sud-Ouest Dimanche, 12 July.

Thomas, Lyn (1999) Annie Ernaux: An Introduction to the Writer and Her Audience, Oxford and New York: Berg.

Tondeur, Claire-Lise (1996) Annie Ernaux ou L'Exil Intérieur, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi.

Waugh, Patricia (1992) editor, Postmodernism: A Reader, London, New York, Sydney, Auckland: Edward Arnold.

Wetherill, P. M. (1987) La place, London and New York: Routledge.

Whitford, Margaret (1991) Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, London and New York: Routledge.