La littérature en bas-bleus, tome III: romancières en France de 1870 à 1914 éd. by Andrea Del Lungo et Brigitte Louichon (review)

The final volume in the series, this collection assembles twenty essays on women writers of the Belle Époque, most of whom will not be familiar to readers (Colette and Rachilde being two notable exceptions). Laying a foundation are the editors' respective opening pieces: Louichon looks first at women writers' counter-attacks on Barbey d'Aurevilly's (in)famous Les bas-bleus, then at the writings of a series of men (one of whom, Albert Cim, went so far as to call bas-bleus "catins" [18]) who did little more than parrot Barbey, while Del Lungo examines the presence (or lack thereof) of women in literary manuals before identifying the criteria (epistemological, generic [gender and genre], biological, social, political) behind women's exclusion from the canon. The essays of three contributors are particularly representative of the book's overall high quality. Rachel Mesch delves into the symbiotic relationship between the press and women's writing in the early 1900s, arguing that the women's magazines Femina and La Vie heureuse played a critical role in the success of writers such as Marcelle Tinayre and Colette Yver by promoting a new model of femininity. Juliette M. Rogers shows how Olympe Audouard uses humor in her portrayal of women involved in financial transactions (who run the gamut from escroc to entremetteuse to "charitable ange gardienne" [195]) in her novel, Les escompteuses. Though Audouard breaks new ground by establishing "un monde de finance au féminin" (202), it is a world where women are not free to demonstrate their financial savvy in public. Claude Puidoyeux considers la comtesse de Gencé's translation of Carlo Collodi's Le avventure di Pinocchio "[une] relecture féminine" (238), thanks to an avant-propos (subtitled "Comment j'ai connu Pinokio") that qualifies as "une autofiction allégorique dont la comtesse se fait à la fois auteure, narratrice et personnage principal" (231), a style that departs from that of the original, and an obvious determination on the countess's part to create a moralizing and instructive fable to which Collodi's story is"assujetti" (235). The collection's footprint is broad—Margot Irvine discusses collaborations between women and male naturalist writers; Laetitia Hanin, the representation of peasants; Laurence Brogniez, the link between spiritism and feminism; Laura Colombo, the intersection of writing and dance; Michela Gardini, occultism in the work of Jane de la Vaudère, to cite just a few examples—as is the range of authors (in addition to those already mentioned) under the microscope: Julia Daudet, Marie Colombier, Raymonde Bonnetain, Anna de Noailles, Gérard d'Houville, Lucie Delarue-Mardrus, Myriam Harry, Louise Michel, André Léo, Joséphine-Blanche Colomb, Marie-Anne de Bovet, Marie-Louise Gagneur, Daniel Lesueur, Thérèse Bentzon, Henry Gréville, Marc de Montifaud, Jeanne Bertheroy, la comtesse de Ségur. Martine Reid brings the trilogy to a reassuring close by maintaining that Han Ryner's ominously titled Massacre des Amazones: étude critique sur deux cents bas-bleus constitutes not a reiteration of the Barbey ideology on which this entire project pivots, but merely the product of an uneasy "quadragénaire anarchiste" eager to "[d]énigrer, épingler, persifler, railler, insulter" (316).