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  • Elizabeth Fallaize (1950–2009)

Elizabeth Fallaize, Co-Editor of French Studies from 1997 to 2002, was a member of the Editorial Board until her death from motor neurone disease on 6 December 2009. She was a significant and very well-known figure in UK French studies, who left her mark on the three very different institutions in which she forged a distinctive academic career. Her success in all areas, from her own path-breaking research on Simone de Beauvoir and French women’s writing, to collaborative feminist initiatives, to the management of institutional change at the University of Oxford, was invariably the result of hard work and extreme professionalism. What appeared to come naturally, on account of her warmth, lively intelligence, and enviable articulacy in both English and French, derived from the meticulous preparation that leads to a clear vision, and then lays the ground for persuading others to share it.

Elizabeth was educated at Dame Allen’s School, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Wallington Grammar School in Surrey. In the sixth form, she excelled in both English and French, but decided to read single-honours French at the University of Exeter, where she graduated in 1972 with the top First Class degree in the Arts Faculty. Remaining at Exeter, she wrote an MA dissertation on Malraux, which was published in 1975 by Minard as André Malraux et le monde de la nature, and began work on a PhD, under the supervision of Michael Packenham, on the Second-Empire photographer and arts journalist Étienne Carjat. She was appointed to her first lectureship in French in 1975, when she joined the large and dynamic Department of Languages at Wolverhampton Polytechnic. This was a useful apprenticeship in more ways than one. While the heavy teaching load involved contributions to all manner of courses, from a Diploma in Languages for Business to a progressive Humanities degree, she also learned that to be a young female member of academic staff was to risk being taken for the other one (in this case Diana Holmes, who was appointed on the same day and became a lifelong close friend).

In 1977 Elizabeth moved to a post at the University of Birmingham and spent thirteen years in its flourishing and sociable French Department. In 1982 she published a second book, on Malraux’s La Voie royale, and in 1984 completed her doctoral thesis on Carjat. She then moved away from the male-focused worlds of Carjat’s Parnassian circle and Malraux’s fictional universe, and began to establish herself as a Beauvoir specialist. This was a period when research could be productively ‘teaching-led’, and the hinge of Elizabeth’s research trajectory was perhaps a final-year module she taught at Birmingham on Malraux and Beauvoir. The political, ethical, and aesthetic emphases of both [End Page 244] writers merged in Elizabeth’s interest in the ideological effects of their narrative strategies; it was logical, therefore, that an increasingly urgent awareness of gender issues should lead her to concentrate on the gradual emergence of a female narrative voice within Beauvoir’s fiction. The Novels of Simone de Beauvoir, published in 1988, was the first study of Beauvoir to focus exclusively on her fictional output. Not only was it in the vanguard of the Beauvoir scholarship that flourished in the 1990s, it changed the terms of critical discussion by drawing attention to the literary importance of works often reduced to their existentialist or political content. Its writing straddled Beauvoir’s death in April 1986, and Elizabeth treasured the memory, shared with her PhD student Jill Wharfe, of interviewing Beauvoir at the rue Schoelcher studio in July 1985.

The Beauvoir book was completed in Paris, for from 1986 to 1988 Elizabeth took unpaid leave, devoting herself to full-time research while her husband Michael Driscoll was seconded from the Birmingham Economics Department to the OECD. While their very young children, Alice and Jack, found their feet in French, Elizabeth, with a self-discipline that took her to the BN every morning at nine, did not waste such a precious opportunity. Étienne Carjat and ‘Le Boulevard’ (1861–1863) was published by Slatkine in 1987 and, whilst seeing the Beauvoir monograph into print...

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