Marie Lenéru

Marie Lenéru at the age of 37

Marie Lenéru (born June 2, 1875 in Brest , † September 23, 1918 in Lorient , France) was a French playwright. However, she is remembered for her diary, which is one of the first documents of feminism in France.

Life

Marie Lenéru came from a family of sailors; her maternal grandfather had even been an admiral. Her father died when she was less than three months old. An uncle, the philosopher and musicologist Lionel Dauriac , took in mother and daughter and ensured their upbringing. The family lived first in Brest, then in Montpellier .

At the age of twelve Marie went through the measles , two years later a ringing in the ears set in as a late consequence , which became more and more violent. Rheumatism in her left knee forced her to take long breaks and prevented her from walking. From the summer of 1889, her eyesight became so bad that she could no longer read or write at times. As a result, she became completely deaf, weak-sighted, and practically mute.

In the following years she began with an immense reading program: Augustine , Theresa von Avila and Nietzsche were among the most important influences , but also Plato , Cicero , Mark Aurel , Schopenhauer , Darwin , Spencer , La Rochefoucauld , Vauvenargues and Renan , among the contemporary writers Baudelaire , Leconte de Lisle and above all Maurice Barrès . In 1899 she discovered the diary of the painter Marie Bashkirtseff , in which she found a kindred spirit.

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First literary steps

At the beginning of the 20th century, Marie Lenéru began to write a novel that remained unfinished (she later reworked it into the play Les Lutteurs ). Parts of an essay on Saint-Just first appeared in the magazine Le Mercure de France in 1906 and 1907 , but she could not make up her mind to make a book out of it. In 1908 an article about the deaf, dumb and blind American woman Helen Keller appeared in the same magazine under the title Sense and Sensibility . Their fate also inspired her to write the prose poem La Vivante , which she submitted to a literary competition. It won first place out of 150 entries. One of the judges, Catulle Mendès , declared her a "female genius".

The plays

After her Saint-Just , she initially contemplated writing biographies, but then discovered the theater. Her great role model was François de Curel . Even their first attempt was a masterpiece. In 1907 she sent the four-act Les Affranchis to Mendès, who responded enthusiastically. In 1908 he brokered the Prix ​​de la Vie Heureuse literary prize for her , in 1910 Les Affranchis was published by Hachette and premiered on December 10th at Odéon . Critics like Léon Blum were enthusiastic and the audience was blown away. Marie Lenéru suddenly belonged to the intellectual elite among French women.

In 1911 she completed La Maison sur le roc , the plot of which can be read as a commentary on her own life: a woman escapes an average married life by discovering her talent as a writer. She has a relationship with a great writer that she eventually leaves. La Maison sur le roc was not published posthumously until 1927.

Her second play Le Redoutable from 1912, unlike Les Affranchis, was received icily by the audience because it was understood as a commentary on the Dreyfus affair . Lenéru withdrew the play after three performances. In the same year she published La Triomphatrice , which was even accepted for performance by the Comédie-Française . However, because of the First World War, it was not premiered until 1918. This piece was also badly received and only saw eight performances.

During the First World War, Lenéru developed into a pacifist . By 1918 she published about 15 articles in the magazine L'Intransigeant , which raised a lot of opposition. In them she campaigned for the idea of ​​the League of Nations by Woodrow Wilson . For the theater she wrote the play La Paix , the performance of which was considered inopportune by the Comédie-Française. At the beginning of 1918 Marie Lenéru left Paris with her mother because of the German bombing and moved to Lorient, where she died shortly before the end of the war. La Paix was not performed by Odéon until 1921.

The diary

In 1886, when Marie was ten years old, her mother bought her a notebook and asked her to keep a diary, which at the time was part of the education of bourgeois daughters. She did this exercise for three years without much enthusiasm. She concluded this Journal d'enfance in January 1890 with a few memories of a trip to the Côte d'Azur .

In 1893, after a long illness, Marie Lenéru resumed writing in a diary. Now the actual journal came into being , in which she assured herself of the few possibilities of expression that were left to her. The diary is one of the first documents of feminism in France, here Marie Lenéru reflects on the possibilities of a woman to lead an independent, self-sufficient life. The diary documents in detail her development as a writer, while it contains little about the time of her literary success. Her mother, whose care was the prerequisite for the success of her life plan, hardly appears either. Marie Lenéru kept the diary for 19 years until shortly before her death.

Works by Marie Lenéru

• Le Redoutable
• La Paix . Grasset, 1922.
• Saint-Just . In: Les cahiers verts . Grasset, 1922.
• Le Bonheur des autres . Bloud et Gay, 1925.
• Les Affranchis . Crès, 1926.
• La Maison sur le roc . Plon, 1927.
• La Triomphatrice . Figuière, 1928.
• Les Lutteurs . Figuière, 1928.
• Journal . Crès, 1945 (two volumes, later reprinted by Grasset).
• Journal 1893-1918 . Bartillat, Paris 2007, ISBN 2-84100-359-0 . (does not include the Journal d'enfance )

literature

• Suzanne Lavaud: Marie Lenéru . Société française d'éditions littéraires et techniques, Paris 1932.
• Margot Brink: I write, so I will. Experience of nothingness and self-creation in the diaries of Marie Bashkirtseff, Marie Lenéru and Catherine Pozzi . Ulrike Helmer Verlag, Königstein / Taunus 1999.

Web links

Commons : Marie Lenéru  - Collection of images, videos and audio files