Abstract
This book brings to life the unique contribution made by French women during the early nineteenth century, a key period in the history of colonialism and slavery. It examines French and Atlantic history in the revolutionary and post-revolutionary years, when Haiti was menaced with the re-establishment of slavery and when class, race, and gender identities were being renegotiated. The book offers readings of works by Germaine de Staël, Claire de Duras, and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, in addition to which it calls attention to the lives and work of two lesser-known but important figures: Charlotte Dard and Sophie Doin. Approaching these five women through the prism of paternal authority, the book explores the empathy that daughters show towards blacks as well as their resistance against the oppression exercised by male colonists and other authority figures. These works by French women antislavery writers bear significant similarities, which the book explores, with twentieth- and twenty-first-century Francophone texts, and allow us to move beyond the traditional boundaries of exclusively male accounts by missionaries, explorers, functionaries, and military or political figures. They remind us of the imperative for ever-renewed gender research in the colonial archive and the need to expand conceptions of French women's literature in the nineteenth century as being a small minority corpus. The book contributes to an understanding of colonial fiction, Caribbean writing, romanticism, and feminism, undercutting distinctions between the cultures of France and its colonies, and between nineteenth- and twentieth-century Francophone writing.
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