Rachilde

Rachilde (Marguerite Eymery)

Rachilde (born February 11, 1860 in the Dordogne as Marguerite Eymery, † April 4, 1953 in Paris ) was a French fin-de-siècle writer . She also published under the pseudonyms Jean de Childra and Jean de Chibra. Her married name was Marie-Marguerite Valette.

Life

As the daughter of an officer who was disappointed about the birth of a daughter, Rachilde left her parents' house at an early age and married the editor of the Symbolist Review Mercure de France Alfred Vallette . The question of her own sexual identity and the relationship between the sexes become her life theme: She dresses as a man and reflects on topics such as transsexuality and women's emancipation in over 60 novels . Numerous Parisian fin de siècle authors took part in their artist meetings held in the Mercure de France, including Jules Renard , Maurice Barrès , Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly , Pierre Louÿs , Émile Verhaeren , Paul Verlaine , Jean Moréas , André Gide and Catulle Mendès , Natalie Clifford Barney , Guillaume Apollinaire , Alfred Jarry , Léon Bloy , Rémy de Gourmont , Joris-Karl Huysmans , Camille Flammarion , Stéphane Mallarmé and Oscar Wilde .

Even if her work has been largely forgotten today, Rachilde is one of the few influential women in French fin de siècle alongside Colette , Coco Chanel and Misia Sert . Her novels Monsieur Vénus from 1884, La Marquise de Sade from 1887 and Madame Adonis from 1888 are still known today and in the wake of a literary interest in gender studies and queerness, some of them are available again in new editions .

Works (selection)

• Monsieur Venus. Roman matérialiste. Brussels, 1884.
• Nono. Roman de moeurs contemporaines. Paris, 1885.
• La Marquise de Sade. Paris, 1887.
• Madame Adonis. Paris, 1888.
• Les Hors Nature. Paris, 1897. (New edition Paris, Séguier 1993 ("Bibliothèque Décadente"). Ed. By Jean de Palacio ).

Works in German translation

• The Panther. Stories. Ed. And preface by Susanne Farin. Essay on the work of Max Bruns . Bouvier, Bonn 1989, ISBN 3-416-02027-8
• Monsieur Venus. A translation from French is in preparation. Translated by Alexandra Beilharz and Anne Schneider. With an afterword by Martine Reid. Ditzingen: Reclam, Philipp, 2020, ISBN 978-3-15-011287-8 . Release date September 25, 2020.

Web links

• Rachilde (Marie-Marguerite Vallette, née Eymery) (French)

literature

• Melanie C. Hawthorne: Rachilde and French women's authorship: from decadence to modernism . University of Nebraska Press, 2001.
• Diana Holmes: Rachilde. Decadence, Gender and the Woman Writer . Berg (Bloomsbury Publishing), London & New York 2002.
• Iris Ulrike Korte-Klimach: Rachilde: femme de lettres - homme de lettres; female authorship in the fin de siècle. Tectum, Marburg 2002, ISBN 3-8288-8379-6
• Nelly Sanchez: Images de l'Homme dans les romans de Rachilde et de Colette (1884-1943) , Éditions Universitaires Européennes, Saarbrücken 2010.
• Susanne Gramatzki: Productive female authorship and its (gender) theoretical reception. The Rachilde case . In: Claudia Gronemann (Ed.): Strategies of authorship in Romania: for the redesign of a category in the context of literary, cultural and media studies based gender theories . Winter, Heidelberg 2012, pp. 83-98.
• Anne-Berenike Rothstein (ed.): Rachilde (1860–1953): Female dandyism as a way of life and representation . Böhlau, Cologne & Weimar & Vienna 2015, ISBN 978-3-412-50158-7