Violette Leduc
Her frank account of love between two schoolgirls was censored in the 1950s – and her memoir “La Bâtarde” became a bestseller.
Violette Leduc was the illegitimate daughter of a servant and the son of a wealthy family who never acknowledged her. She grew up in poverty in northern France. At boarding school she had love affairs with a classmate and a supervisor, which led to her expulsion.
She worked in Paris as a telephone operator and publishing assistant. In 1945 she met Simone de Beauvoir, whom she loved passionately and in vain, and who became her mentor and championed her work. Her first novels appeared with the publisher Gallimard.
In her novel “Ravages” (1955) she described the love between two schoolgirls in a boarding school. The publisher cut the passages as too explicit. The censored part was only published in 1966 as “Thérèse and Isabelle”, and in full only in 2000. Leduc also loved men, among them the writer Maurice Sachs, and wrote about her unhappy love for Jean Genet.
Her autobiographical book “La Bâtarde” (1964), with a preface by Beauvoir, finally brought her success and was nominated for the Prix Goncourt. She died of cancer in Provence in 1972, aged 65.