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.

In the following excerpt, Thomas and Webb discuss how the autobiographical works of Ernaux and Marie Cardinal fit into the genre of French feminist writing—écriture féminine—examining the critical reaction to their work in France and abroad.

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...