Sagan, Françoise (Pseudonym of Françoise Quoirez) 1935–

Sagan is a French novelist and playwright whose works often deal with brief, tentative relationships and love affairs. She concerns herself with trying to understand the motivation behind the actions of her characters—bored, lonely people whom she depicts sharply. Her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse, was written when she was eighteen, making her an instant literary celebrity. Her pseudonym comes from the character of the Princess of Sagan in Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. (See also CLC, Vols. 3, 6, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 49-52.)

Françoise Sagan has in her time said some wry things about love; in Lost Profile, the insights are thin on the ground—the worst thing about a break-up, for instance, is "not just leaving one another, but leaving one another for different reasons". There are some nice touches…. But some of the writing is so overdone as to be ludicrous….

Françoise Sagan began writing novels over twenty years ago, as a precocious adolescent; and to her contemporaries her early work was indeed "sophisticated and erotic". But now she is still writing for adolescents of the 1950s, hung-up on father figures, mad about puppies.

Victoria Glendinning, "Josée & Julius & Louis," in The Times Literary Supplement (© Times Newspapers Ltd., 1976; reproduced from The Times Literary Supplement by permission), March 19, 1976, p. 311.

Sagan's particular passion of the minute is to be pitied and solaced. It is a closeted world, incredulously French, with a narrow mix of sympathy and arrogance.

Writing Bonjour Tristesse Miss Sagan had an excuse for such a self-opinionated heart. To find that in her tenth novel, Lost Profile, she has advanced her profundity not at all, is still playing the cramped teenager trying to escape Daddy, comes as something of a shock. Her novels are short and as full of wry observations about people in love as ever they were. 'Wild passion I admired, and loyalty and spontaneity and even a certain kind of fidelity.' This puts her emotional manifesto in a nutshell, a rather shallow, quasi hysterical woman with a passive pantheistic belief in the soul as something tossed helplessly by natural forces, yet admitting the possibility that even fidelity can be admirable under certain circumstances. Only a rather genteel upbringing, it seems, prevents her from seeking out rape, the more violent the better, an example of the desire for maltreatment which is of course Woman's lot when you get down to it. (p. 23)

Duncan Fallowell, in The Spectator (© 1976 by The Spectator; reprinted by permission of The Spectator), March 27, 1976.

[In Silken Eyes] is an elegant and brittle art, a pricey collection of tiny figurines and minute porcelains, where passion and ageing must never be allowed to fall heavily among the stylishly placed bric-à-brac, and people are mannequins, stereotypes, puppets, the contrivance of whose making is given away from time to time by the odd lifeless judder of manipulation. These stories work best when the particular examples of the international set on display, with their Maseratis and Creed jackets and Dior dresses and smart houses in Paris, are continental. Shooting chamois and wanting to shoot your rival, flaunting gigolos, shooting yourself abstractedly, crashing your car deliberately, being bored and beautiful and in Vogue , seem much more fetching when a Jerome Berthier or Countess Josepha von Kraftenberg is involved. Like middling food and crumby movies these upper-class glossies are, as it were, all right in French. But when it's a case of Lord Stephen Timberley and Emily Highlife at Dunhill Castle,...