Sophie de Bawr: Successful Resistance, Resisting Success

Abstract

Baronesse Sophie de Bawr’s La Suite d’un bal masqué (1813), performed 246 times, was the most successful play by a French woman of her era. Overall Bawr wrote 12 plays, all of which were performed on Paris’s premier stages. Her light touch and witty characters made her theater popular for generations of audiences. Despite her talent and her success, Sophie de Bawr did not seek to become a lauded playwright but rather preferred to dissociate herself from Paris theater culture and its not altogether upstanding reputation. In an 1861 biography of Bawr, Elise Gagne (pseudonym for poet Élise Moreau) suggests that Bawr selected writing as a career not out of any desire for glory but for financial survival. Gagne further emphasizes the laudable character of Bawr’s morally edifying writings that served to uplift rather than degrade (6). Gagne’s assessment of Sophie de Bawr’s talent cannot be separated from her constant insistence on Bawr’s persona:

Ce que nous avons toujours le plus admiré dans madame de Bawr, c’est qu’elle n’était point avide de cette renommée à tout prix, qu’ambitionne si ardemment la littérature actuelle … Si vous avez un talent hors ligne, une foi profonde dans le Dieu qui vous l’a donné, une grande droiture de conscience, soyez tranquille,vous serez lent à parvenir, peut-être, mais vous parviendrez! (18)

[What we have always most admired in Madame de Bawr is that she was not at all greedy for this reputation at all cost, that today’s literature covets so ardently … If you have outstanding talent, a profound faith in the God who gave it to you, a rectitude of conscience, be calm, you will be slow to succeed perhaps, but you will succeed!]