SOURCE: “Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786-1859),” in French Women Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Source Book, edited by Eva Martin Sartori and Dorothy Wynne Zimmerman, Greenwood Press, 1988, pp. 121-33.

In the following essay, Danahy offers a summary of Desbordes-Valmore's life and work.

Biography

Marceline Desbordes was born on June 20, 1786, the fifth of six children in a working-class family. Her father was an artisan whose livelihood came from painting family crests, shields, and coats of arms for members of the aristocracy. When this trade became obsolete as a result of the French Revolution, Desbordes-Valmore's father went bankrupt and never recovered from the blow. During the same period, Desbordes-Valmore's mother took a lover, with whom she fled in 1797, leaving behind all but the youngest surviving girl, Marceline, then eleven years old. Family ties, parent-child relations, and the meaning of motherhood, as well as the woes of the dejected and downtrodden, would deeply preoccupy the...