Hortense Allart

The Woman and the Novelist
Hortense Allart provides a biography of the French feminist and Romantic writer from the nineteenth century. Allart was a close friend and correspondent of several well-known writers of her time, including Chateaubriand, Sainte-Beuve, Béranger, George Sand, and Marie d'Agoult, and was a first cousin of the poet Sophie Gay de Girardin. In addition to her novels, political and religious essays, and historical writings, her most famous essay Le Femme et la Democratie de Nos Temps makes her stand out in her own time, and serves as a significant precursor to the twentieth century feminist literary movement. The author intermingles biographical information with analyses of her ten novels and her chief essay, and analyzes in modern feminist critical terms how Allart prefigured the reach for a gynocentric language that is the focus of contemporary women's writing, using the original French to quote Allart's works.