French Women Poets of Nine Centuries: The Distaff and the Pen (review)

This is a beautiful book, a simple comment which needs further elaboration. The beauty of this book lies not just in its material form (wonderful paper and print) but in the evident care and dedication with which it was produced. All those involved in the project (and particularly Norman Shapiro) deserve warm praise for their work in making available poetry by French women writers from the twelfth to the twentieth century. The word 'beautiful' at the start of this review was used very deliberately to situate this book in terms of its relationship to the various emotions expressed by the poets in its pages. Poetry is often a highly intimate literary form and as such it allows access to the subjective world of another person. In the twenty-first century we have become used to the idea of 'emotional literacy' but that very phrase is often used in a way which vulgarizes emotion and does more to separate people from each other than to bring them together. This volume sets up a standard for an understanding of the ways in which the expression of one person's experience of the world can assist many others, not through the generalization of 'feeling' but through a more precise articulation. As the poet Marie-Amable de La Ferandiere wrote, in 1789, women have always felt 'how sweet it is to write'. As the pages of this volume suggest, the subjects of the poems were not always 'sweet'. Loss, betrayal, hardship and pain are the themes which run through these pages and as Roberta Krueger, Catherine LaFarge, Catherine Perry and Rosanna Warren make clear in their various introductions, the women poets included here articulate those themes in ways which are particular to women. Across generations women write of the many pitfalls of adult love but they write too, particularly in the poems written before the nineteenth century of loving and affectionate relationships with Nature, whether animal, plant or place. In reading the poems (and in being allowed to read them in two forms through the generous provision of both the original French and the translation) what comes across is the particularity of a female response to the world. French feminism in the late twentieth century (in the works of women such as Irigaray and Cixous) emphasized the difference of the feminine and in this volume readers might observe the sense of that difference and the way in which it is expressed, not just through words, but also through reactions and engagements with the world, in all its various manifestations. But this volume is no mere illustration of various theories, it stands as a rich testament to the power (and diversity) of the written word.