Violette Leduc
| Violette Leduc | |
|---|---|
Violette Leduc
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| Born |
7 April 1907 Arras, Pas-de-Calais, France |
| Died | 28 May 1972 (aged 65) Faucon, Vaucluse, France |
Violette Leduc (7 April 1907 – 28 May 1972) was a French author.
She was born in Arras, Pas de Calais, France, the illegitimate daughter of a servant girl, Berthe. In Valenciennes, Violette spent most of her childhood suffering from poor self-esteem, exacerbated by her mother's hostility and excessive protectiveness. She developed tender friendships with her grandmother Fideline and her maternal aunt Laure.
Her formal education began in 1913, but was interrupted by World War I. After the war, she went to a boarding school, the Collège de Douai, where she experienced lesbian affairs with a classmate and a music instructor who was fired over the incident.
In 1926 Leduc moved to Paris and enrolled in the Lycée Racine. That same year, she failed her baccalaureate exam and began working as a press cuttings clerk and secretary at Plon publishers later becoming a writer of news pieces about their publications.
In 1942 she met Maurice Sachs and Simone de Beauvoir, who encouraged her to write. Her first novel, L'Asphyxie (In the Prison of Her Skin), was published by Albert Camus for Éditions Gallimard and earned her praise from Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet.
In 1955 Leduc was forced to remove part of her novel Ravages because of sexually explicit passages describing lesbianism. The censored part was eventually published as a separate novella, Thérèse and Isabelle, in 1966. Another novel, Le Taxi, caused controversy because of its depiction of incest between a brother and sister. Critic Edith J. Benkov compared this novel with the work of Marguerite Duras and Nathalie Sarraute.
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