Abstract
Annie Leclerc’s Parole de femme, published in 1974, was one of the first texts to emerge from the feminist consciousness of the 1970s, and immediately became both a best-seller and the subject of some controversy.1 Its title, usually translated as ‘Woman’s Word’, appeared to be a manifesto laying claim to the specificity of women’s language, although Leclerc herself primarily intended the title to be read as a humorous subversion of the expression ‘parole d’homme’, which has the meaning of ‘on my word/honour as a man.2 As this second sense of the title suggests, one of the main thrusts of the text is a critique of a certain kind of virility which Leclerc identifies as embodied in screen heroes of the Orson Wells type or in the Malraux adventurer model in literature, and which, she argues, does as great a disservice to men as it does to women. Masculinity is presented in the text as an inherently unstable state which feeds on reinforcements of this type.3
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Annie Leclerc bibliography
Books and articles by Leclerc
Annie Leclerc, Le Pont du Nord (Paris: Gallimard, 1967).
Annie Leclerc, Parole de femme (Paris; Grasset, 1974). Translated extracts from Parole de femme appear in French Connections: Voices from the Women’s Movement in France ed. by Claire Duchen (London: Hutchinson, 1987), pp. 58–63; and in French Feminist Thought ed. by Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), pp. 73–9.
Annie Leclerc, Epousailles (Paris: Grasset, 1976).
Annie Leclerc, Au feu du jour (Paris: Grasset, 1979).
Annie Leclerc, Hommes et femmes (Paris: Grasset, 1985).
Annie Leclerc, Le Mal de mère (Paris: Grasset, 1986).
Annie Leclerc, Origines (Paris: Grasset, 1988).
Annie Leclerc, Clé (Paris: Grasset, 1989).
Annie Leclerc, ‘Etoile-Nation’, Les Temps Modernes, vol. 23 (1967), pp. 44–64. ‘Je vais te manger’, Sorcières, vol. 1 (1976), pp. 28–30.
Annie Leclerc, ‘Communication’, Liberté, vols. 106/7 (1976), pp. 15–19.
Annie Leclerc, ‘Mon écriture d’amour’, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 26 May 1976, p. 19.
Annie Leclerc, ‘La lettre d’amour’, in La Venue à l’écriture, by Madeleine Gagnon, Hélène Cixous and Annie Leclerc (Paris: Union générale d’editions, 1977), pp. 117–52.
Annie Leclerc, ‘Postface’, in Autrement dit, by Marie Cardinal (Paris: Grasset, 1977), pp. 211–22.
Annie Leclerc, ‘On laissait faire les femmes’, Le Sauvage January 1977, pp. 10–18.
Articles on Leclerc’s work and selected reviews
Alzon, Claude, ‘Le féminisme d’Annie Leclerc: “Parole de femme” ou “Propos d’homme”?’, in Femme mythifiée, femme mystifiée (Paris: PUF, 1978), pp. 93–101.
Anderson, Margaret ‘La jouissance–principe d’écriture’, L’Esprit Créateur, vol. 19 (summer 1979), pp. 3–12.
Brochier, Jean-Jacques ‘Aimer Rousseau’, Le Magazine littéraire, March 1988, p. 8.
Cesbron, Georges, ‘Ecritures au féminin. Propositions de lecture pour quatre livres de femme’, Degré Second, vol. 4 (1980), pp. 95–119.
Delphy, Christine, ‘Protoféminisme et anti-féminisme’, Les Temps Modernes, vol. 30 (1976), pp. 1469–1500. Trans. by Diana Leonard in Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression (London: Hutchinson, 1984), pp. 182–210.
Gallop, Jane, ‘Annie Leclerc: Writing a letter with Vermeer’, October, no. 33 (1985), pp. 103–18
Gallop, Jane, ‘Reprinted and re-titled as part of Carnal Knowledge,’ in Jane Gallop Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), pp. 165–78.
Gelfand, Elissa and Virginia Thorndike Hules (eds), French Feminist Criticism: Women, Language and Literature. An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland Publishing, 1985), pp. 230–6.
Granjon, Marie-Christine, ‘Les femmes, le langage et “l’écriture”, Raison Présente, no. 39 (1976), pp. 25–32.
Savigneau, Josyane ‘Annie Leclerc et la passion de Jean-Jacques’, Le Monde des livres, 4 March 1988, p. 4.
Vilaine, Anne-Marie de, ‘Le corps de la théorie’, Magazine littéraire, January 1982, pp. 25–8.
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© 1993 Elizabeth Fallaize
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Fallaize, E. (1993). Annie Leclerc. In: French Women’s Writing. Women in Society. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23002-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23002-0_7
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