Florentine (novel)

Florentine is a novel in French by the Swiss writer Élisabeth Burnod . It was written in Paris in 1943 , published in 1949 by Jehebever Verlag ( Geneva / Paris) and is the second of eight novels with which the author rose to the Grandes Dames of French-speaking women in the 1960s . The book is dedicated to Claudine Cantacuzène.

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The three sisters Thérèse, Florentine and Aimée, between the ages of eleven and fourteen, lost their mother, Hélène, who was suffering from tuberculosis, at an early age and live with her mother in well-off middle-class circumstances. While Thérèse and Ainée, who are also suffering from tuberculosis, have no problems with their grandmother's strict upbringing dictates, Florentine is increasingly revolting against it. The reason for this is her monthly visit to her father Jérôme Advener, who lives nearby, to whom she has a close relationship, but who, as a painter and free thinker, is strictly rejected by her grandmother. Blaise Carrière, an unmarried old friend of the family, recognizes the problematic situation and tries in vain to mediate between the different characters. In the end, through the death of his daughter Thérèse, the father finds entry into the grandmother's house, but it remains open whether he will take Florentine with him.

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As in her 1946 novel Le Miracle des violettes , Burnod also uses autobiographical elements in Florentine ; Burnod had lost her mother too early.

The focus of the novel is on the understanding and will for freedom of the adolescent Florentine. She recognizes the incompatibility between narrow bourgeois conventions and free thinking. The escalating arguments with the grandmother cannot break her will, but lead to inner loneliness. She only thinks temporarily that she finds support in her thinking in people around her, but then she is always disappointed.

Even in this first Burnod novel, the later recurring motive is evident: the conflict in which strong-willed women find themselves in a bourgeois society cannot be resolved without fundamental changes to this social system.

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1. ↑ Florentine is Burnod's first novel in terms of its time of origin and its autobiographical content ; Elisabeth Burnod  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. in Bibliomedia Switzerland .  
2. ^ So Michelle Kuttel: Une grande Romancière n'est plus. In: Information culturelle SPS , November 26, 1979. On the work of Elisabeth Burnod cf. also Henri-Charles Dahlem: Elisabeth Burnod. In: Dictionnaire des écrivains suisses d'expression française. (Ed .: Alain Nicollier, Henri-Charles Dahlem.) Geneva 1994, ISBN 2-88115-012-8 , Vol. 1, pp. 150-151, and Cathérine Dubuis: Du roman bougeois au roman engagé. In: Histoire de la literature en Suisse romande. (Ed .: Roger Francillon.) Vol. 3: De la Seconde Guerre aux années 1970. Lausanne 1998, here p. 319.
3. ↑ on Claudia Cantacuzène see the article on Élisabeth Burnod .
4. ↑ In an interview with Jaqueline Thévos ( Elisabeth Burnod. In: Femmes suisses et le Mouvement féministe , Organe officiel des informations de l'Alliance de Sociétés Féminines Suisses, 64, No. 2 (Feb. 1976) doi : 10.5169 / seals-274442 ) the author herself emphasized in 1976 that all of her novels have an autobiographical reference.
5. ↑ See the biography of Elisabeth Burnod