Literary Patronage: Collaboration or Rivalry? Women's Prefaces to Women's Texts in the 20th Century

One of the most renowned instances of prefatory recommendation in the twentieth century is Simone de Beauvoir's preface to La Bâtarde by Violette Leduc. Although Beauvoir's patronage undoubtedly contributed to Leduc's success, the preface is imbued with a palpable sense of rivalry between Beauvoir's authoritative discourse and the text she promotes. It looks to elaborate on Beauvoir's own autobiographical project. Her insistence that one must read Leduc' s narrated life as an existential project reveals her desire to colonize Leduc's life story as an example of her own brand of autobiography. In contrast, Annie Leclerc's allographic afterword to Marie Cardinal's Autrement dit is a non-traditional, dialogical preface that avoids using Leclerc's paratextual authority. Instead, she privileges a feminist ideal of community and collaboration and highlights the text's own fluidity, open-endedness, and dialogism. Leclerc's dialogical afterword acknowledges that her quest for self-knowledge became possible only through her engagement with Marie Cardinal.