Femme qui court by Gérard de Cortanze (review)

Historical fiction usually approximates events that happened. This novel about the super-athlete Violette Morris does such an approximation of her struggles in searching for her place in the male-dominated arena of athletic competition. The story begins in 1910 when she is seventeen and in her final year at a convent school for girls in the Meuse Valley. She excels competitively in swimming, running sprints, cycling, javelin throwing, weightlifting, and cross country. She is especially admired by her schoolmate Sarah. But Violette's promising athletic career is soon untracked when she is raped by Octave, the school gardener, who is also a voyeur of the girl athletes taking showers on campus. The man is relentless and lurks wherever Violette is. Transferring to another school recommended by her female coach, Violette is again victimized but this time by Claire, a financial protector and lesbian predator. This encounter results in Violette's being expelled from the academy and losing all her trophies and medals to avoid further scandal for the school. Nearing twenty years old, she challenges men in athletic competitions as boxing becomes her preferred sport. Her protector Claire encourages Violette's bearded marriage to Cyprien, who is immediately mobilized as the Great War begins. Not to be outdone by another competitive male, Violette enlists and sees action as an ambulance driver on the front and then as a motorcycle courier when pleurisy causes her to be transferred to the rear in a hospital with women who have had illegal abortions. Constantly bothered by the misogyny of the soldiers, she cuts her hair, wears a helmet, and disguises herself as a man with cigarette in mouth. This masquerade as a man conveniently shields her after the war, without the helmet of course. Surviving the war changes both Cyprien and Violette. They divorce, and she reunites with Sarah, her former schoolmate who still competes athletically as a runner and a swimmer. Violette retains her masculine hair style and dress, adopts feminist social and political stances, and receives much rejection from contemporary men and women for her appearance. Ignoring the advice to specialize in a single sport, Violette insists on playing multiple sports and even adds soccer at twenty-seven years old. She flaunts her lesbian orientation, thus provoking the press and French women outside the world of sports. Violette earns the friendships of Jean Cocteau and Josephine Baker but piques many French with her alternate lifestyle. She even antagonizes the organizers of women's sports and has to turn to race-car driving in her continuous search for spectators and admirers. Newspaper citations from her reactionary contemporaries lend an air of documentary fiction to this story whose heroine seems so audacious as to lack credibility even in our own time. While she was a scapegoat for those threatened by changes in gender roles, she did her best to create a space for herself wherein she could excel and be self-determined. Her story gives history and breadth to present-day gender struggles.