THE WRITER WRITES BACK
At a 1907 banquet honoring publisher Pierre Lafitte’s recent nomination to the Legion of Honor, Daniel Lesueur offered a toast (reproduced in the February 15 issue) in which she applauded his accomplishments in creating Femina. The magazine, she said, introduced young women to a newly multivalent life, opening before them “an active, intellectual, modern existence.”1 For women writers, she added, it had special significance, dramatically changing the response of readers to their work, producing thoughtfulness and creativity in the letters they received, and a whole new engaging set of questions. Above Lesueur’s remarks were the answers to Femina’s most recent opinion survey—on favorite professions for women. The winner: “Femmes de lettres,” with 7,645 votes.
Women writers were of course major stakeholders in Belle Epoque literary feminism—those for whom the magazines’ glorification and promotion of their chosen profession had rather direct consequences. And yet, despite the myriad dazzling images of so many literary darlings of Femina and La Vie Heureuse, we know little of the role they might have played in their self-presentation within the magazines’ feature stories, or in the manipulation and circulation of their own images. We can safely surmise, if simply from the sheer number of the images of Tinayre, Noailles, Harry and Delarue-Mardrus, that they were willing participants, and in some cases their expressions give a bit of indication as to their own agency.2 While some of these women published memoirs and autobiographical writing, they say frustratingly little about the magazines or their own role in what the publications accomplished (or awareness of the impact of these accomplishments at all).3 Even after the establishment of the Prix Vie Heureuse, we are left with little more than matter-of-fact descriptions of proceedings and results rather than personal reflections or behind-the-scenes accounts that might give us more of a sense of any challenges or conflict they might have faced.4 Moreover, the accumulation within the magazines of gorgeous images of these thinking women—while elevating their lot—has the unfortunate result of disempowering them as individuals, making them appear too often as decorative objects to admire rather than voices to be heard.
As the magazines gained their foothold and established their identity, however, many of their favored female literary celebrities shifted from being the object of study and fascination to being regular contributors, and their perspectives and own voices came into clearer focus. Two of the most successful of these writers—Marcelle Tinayre and Lucie Delarue-Mardrus—betray, in their efforts to speak directly to their chères lectrices (both within and beyond the magazines), a deep understanding of the influence of these publications on women readers, and an awareness of their own potential role therein. In examining some of their own words, we see a little of how these writers bridged the gap between reader and celebrity in order to make the work of the magazine more personal, relevant and compelling. Their writing gives indication of their relationship, not just to new ideas surrounding modern femininity, but to their sense of the magazines’ role in manipulating or shaping these ideas. Although intimately connected to the magazines, Tinayre and Delarue-Mardrus were not simply mouthpieces for its work, but rather, subtle commentators on it, each in her own way.
In October 1904, Femina published a multipage feature story on Tinayre, replete with images of her home, children and husband, and heartwarming details about the nature of her domestic life. “With her great talent as a writer,” we quickly learn, “Madame Tinayre combines a lovely modesty. She leads a simple life out of public view, split between her study and her children’s games.”5 The chief concern of the article was to diffuse any anxiety readers might have about Tinayre’s lifestyle given the nature—and title—of her best-selling and critically acclaimed novel, La maison du péché (House of Sin). Centered between the italicized paragraphs of this introduction is a photo of Tinayre in profile, standing outside next to a haphazard-looking rock formation, demurely holding her hat. Underneath, the caption reads: “La maison du péché,” followed by the explanation: “Madame Marcelle Tinayre in her garden, near a little stone cabin that her kids have named The House of Sin” (Fig. 4.1). The subversive title of the book is thus transformed, quite literally, into child’s play. Lest we miss these less-than-subtle messages, however, the article concludes: “Thus this house where The House of Sin was born is a house of happiness.”
The interview with Jacques de Nouvion, who signs the article, is full of Tinayre’s adorably charming interjections, and a desire to address the reader herself: “Tell them that I love my children,” he quotes her as saying, in her self-effacing way, “and that I’m a good mom, even if I don’t know how to wash up a child or teach them to read.” As the questions continue, she offers to write the piece herself, and the rest of the article is the “lovely note” that she sends instead. In this way, then, Tinayre takes hold of her own image and its surrounding narrative, writing of the careful distinctions between her identity as a writer and the nature of her characters, and her own sense of the creative process. Those all-too charming earlier interjections, in this context, seem like nervous efforts to control the story that would be told.
In the part of the article that she writes, Tinayre describes a forthcoming novel that is especially dear to her heart. She had been in the midst of writing a different one, she explains, “but then I wasn’t free to choose.” She ends up finishing what was at the time tentatively entitled Le Coeur de Josanne but which later would become La rebelle. As it turns out, La rebelle is a novel about a woman working at a magazine similar to the very one in which Tinayre is introducing it. Indeed, Tinayre’s independent-minded protagonist Josanne de Valentin works for Le Monde Féminin, which bills itself as “the greatest magazine in the world” and serves as a central character in her drama.6 The novel describes a large-format photographic magazine in which the editors “touted babies and tutus, elegant charities and athletic feats, the domestic virtues of queens, the modesty of women poets and the marriages of actors” (44). In her novel, then, Tinayre shines a not-always-favorable light on the inner workings of the publications so central to her own career success.
Figure 4.1 Feature story on Marcelle Tinayre, “next to the stone hut that her children have nicknamed ‘La maison du péché.’” Femina (October 1, 1904).
While her official job is “associate of the associate editor,” Josanne is also “the do-it-all employee” filling in everywhere from editing to writing to printing. Some days this includes answering phones, including one caller who threatens to switch to Femina and La Vie Heureuse if not reimbursed for a missed issue. Early in the novel, these referents signal to the reader Le Monde Féminin’s peer publications. The magazine’s cofounder, Madeleine Foucart, “the prettiest woman in Paris,” is the image of the femme moderne, although in this case, happily accepting the feminist label. In fact, she was likely modeled after the founder of La Fronde, Marguerite Durand, known by this very epithet.7 Tinayre provides in these pages a tongue-in-cheek description of the office in which Josanne works. In the hustle and bustle of deadlines and print media, expediency regularly wins out over truth. Rushing to get his fashion designs to press, Monsieur Foucart reminds a young staffer that these images need have little to do with art or nature. Minutes later, Josanne is negotiating a debate about whether a nude baby picture of a famous actress can be used for their series “Great Young Actresses” (42). The narrator continues, echoing precisely the opening statement of La Vie Heureuse, while mocking both its elitism and the naiveté of its readers: “In Le Monde Féminin, all the women were pretty; nearly all were virtuous; all the men were ‘talented’ . . . Men and women, they were all rich. Within suave interiors, they displayed high-fashion attire from the biggest couturiers. And their images, their life stories, all their fame and glory, would trouble the hearts of little provincial subscribers, those Bovarys from Limoges and Quimper-Corentin” (44–45).
Tinayre echoes this discomfort with the magazine’s manipulation of its readers once again when Josanne is charged with answering their foolish letters, seeking advice about looking younger and slimmer. Writing these letters, she is brought to tears by the sheer inanity of her work: “What a life, my God, what a life!” (36). In another scene, Josanne watches as her editor, the unmarried dowdy feminist Mademoiselle Bon (who, incidentally, while a brilliant contributor, is hidden in a back office so that subscribers might never come across her embarrassing inelegance in person) allows her photographer to arrange a picture of a charitable home for unwed mothers so as to hide their pregnant bellies; later, discouraged by the story of one of these mothers who has abandoned her child to return to her abusive partner, she asks Mademoiselle Bon whether she is discouraged by “this trade of deception that you do! . . . Lift up women, educate women, liberate women” (129).
And yet, the readers of La rebelle were, in large measure, also likely readers of Femina and La Vie Heureuse—as the De Nouvion piece would ensure. Josanne, we saw from those comments, was a figure close to Tinayre’s heart—indeed, it’s hard not to see her as a direct reflection of the author. How then to read Tinayre’s comments on women’s magazines—the very organs in which she was not only celebrated as queen of her own “suave interior,” but through which she had reached out to her readers to comment on a novel in which she would paint a critical portrait of these magazines and their readers?
Perhaps this ambivalent stance was one of the reasons for Tinayre’s commercial success, one of the reasons that she was adored by these very readers. Tinayre’s criticism of the women’s press is all the more significant because of Josanne’s need for what it might potentially offer: while she is a member of the editorial staff, she also represents a certain kind of reader of these magazines: she struggles not just to balance work and love, but to define herself comfortably through this balance. This desire reminds us of the heroine of Camille Pert’s Leur égale and her fantasy of a women’s magazine that would offer a forum for discussing issues addressing contemporary women. Like Pert’s Thérèse, Josanne is looking for something more from these magazines—eager not (just) for the mondanités and fashion that draw in readers, but for “the philosophy and social issues.”8
As much as Josanne/Tinayre criticizes its artifice, Le Monde Féminin also offers Josanne an important forum—the possibility of commenting on the work of her eventual love interest, feminist author Noël Delysle: she will review his treatise La Travailleuse, an event that launches their love affair. The magazine thus becomes for her both an intellectual outlet and a conduit to deeply ambivalent romance, one which will lead her to embrace feminist partner Noël as her “master,” while insisting that such a gesture does not compromise her feminism (we will discuss Tinayre’s version of the “new man” in greater detail in the next chapter). Josanne’s love story demonstrates precisely the magazine’s twist on the modern Cinderella. Her ending, although not quite a fairy tale, is sappy and romantic. While she insists on her feminism, the label seems at odds with her embrace of a decidedly traditional female role. The key, I would argue, is the struggle to get there, the fact that her critical acumen is what leads her to love, that her golden pen, as it were, replaces the glass slipper.
But let’s not ignore Tinayre’s criticism either. By turning a sharp eye to the women’s press even as she embraces its possibilities, Tinayre both points a finger and winks at her readers. Don’t be seduced, she reminds. Read the magazines, for who can resist, but not just for the glossy photos; read the book reviews; read the novels; be mindful, be self-aware. There are no easy answers. The modern woman is a bundle of contradictions. We are all Bovarys of Limoges, prey to the seductive powers of consumer culture, and to the desire for romance and self-fulfillment through love, and that doesn’t stop us from being sophisticated readers as well. As in Prévost’s description of Femina’s lectrices, the magazine symbolizes a collapse of boundaries, not just between reader and celebrity role model, but between kinds of readers—sophisticated Parisian, provincial worker. Tinayre reminds us that just as the provinciale exquise can momentarily fancy herself a Parisian sophisticate, so the sophisticated Parisian can become, for a moment at least, a Bovary of Limoges—just as we all do, dear reader, when we pick up People magazine in the supermarket and take pleasure in ogling someone like Tinayre herself.
“An Attentive, Trustworthy Friend”
While Josanne was initially frustrated with certain aspects of the feminism promoted by the magazine for which she worked, as a contributor she not only benefited from the intellectual community it provided, but had an opportunity to reach readers directly. Lucie Delarue-Mardrus’s own turn as a columnist for Femina offers an even more explicit example of how a woman writer herself could participate in the imaginative work of Femina and La Vie Heureuse. Beginning in 1908, Delarue-Mardrus contributed a regular literary column entitled “L’âme des livres” for Femina in which she promised to be for her readers “an attentive, trustworthy friend.” While speaking to bourgeois women readers in their own idiom, Delarue-Mardrus proposed sophisticated—and sometimes subversive—ideas about what they should be reading, and, more significantly, what they themselves might consider writing. Here we see the feminist influence of Femina staged explicitly, as the newly minted authoress encouraged women to push themselves further as readers and writers. Delarue-Mardrus’s confident, feminine voice in these columns conformed neither to the earlier images of the poet as demure European ingénue nor to those of her as a smug cross-dressing amazon; and yet her familiarity as a media icon authorized her role as a trusted friend and confidant for thousands of readers.
If Delarue-Mardrus’s role in manipulating her earlier photographic images was not clear, her expertise in exploiting her verbal authority was, by contrast, manifestly so. In her inaugural column, Delarue-Mardrus posed the question of what readers look for in a book, as a means of calling attention to Femina’s unanticipated role as promoter of literature. The enduring value of the book against all odds, she noted, was brought into relief in the magazine through the simple fact that literature took up such a prominent place. Femina itself, remarked Delarue-Mardrus, was proof of the “supremacy of the book,” for in the magazine “the beautiful images didn’t end up preventing us from being drawn to talking about literary works in a more extensive and regular fashion than had been anticipated.”9 She herself of course was one such example of how this came to be true.
While Delarue-Mardrus’s column was meant to guide female readers toward appropriate literary choices, it also steadily urged those readers to consider themselves as writers. In the first column, Delarue-Mardrus commented on the fact that it was a natural instinct to remark to oneself, “What a great novel I would write about this or that experience I’ve had, if I were a writer!” This, she concluded, meant that “everyone contains within them the instinct of a book (l’instinct du livre).” The pleasure and continuing dominance of the book, she argued, stemmed not from a readerly instinct but rather a writerly one, from the thrill of finding on paper what the reader herself might have written, had she known how to go about doing so. Indeed, when you love a book, wrote Delarue-Mardrus, it is because you have found in it, without realizing, “the work that you were carrying around obscurely in your own head or heart.” Delarue-Mardrus then went on to recommend books to readers of different ages, but stopped to meditate on the lack of works for adolescent girls, those “creatures of transition” between girlhood and adulthood. Books fail to treat the young woman in her reality, but rather only as a “gamine attardée,” or a “future woman.” Perhaps, she wrote, young women themselves should be the ones to fill in this gap, for they themselves could capture the reality of the experience. Only they could “naturally fascinate their female readers and compensate for the books they are not allowed to read.”
It is unclear in those last musings whether Delarue-Mardrus had her metaphorical tongue planted firmly in her cheek, for she went on to note that the same could be said for children, who would also be best equipped to captivate their peers if they could write. But she picked up the thread once again several months later in November, when she used her column to declare—this time far more explicitly: “It’s time women told their own stories.” Women’s true experiences need to be written, she explained, to offer “a counterpart to this growing pile of volumes of male ink on the Woman in Love.”10 Delarue-Mardrus’s argument here offers a clear example of Belle Epoque literary feminism, which advocated for women’s rights to traditional male roles through an emphasis upon what made them uniquely feminine and through literary channels. Men have written well about women, Delarue-Mardrus conceded, using Madame Bovary as a central example. But women could do even better. “Men, after all, only have their heads to enlighten them [on the subject], but women have their whole being.” And women as “suffering creatures” have all sorts of miseries that only they can recount. They also have the leisure time at home to reflect. “There is no more captivating enigma than that of woman,” wrote Delarue-Mardrus, urging women themselves to be the ones to unveil this mystery. She thus used the very same notions of feminine difference that were deployed throughout the nineteenth century in order to exclude women from professional roles, to make a case in favor of women writers. In doing so, she implicitly questioned the logic of the traditional thinking that young women’s reading led to hysteria.11 These same qualities—inscrutability, propensity to illness and reverie—now became a reason that women should both read and write.
Delarue-Mardrus’s editorial presence, then, traces Femina’s clear path in leading women from reading to writing, as well as the role of the famous woman writer therein. In her essays, Delarue-Mardrus guided readers from being passive admirers of captivating women writers to imagining themselves as that very thing—the visual evidence making the possibility all the more evident and compelling. Delarue-Mardrus passed into the powerful second person in this piece, as she urged women directly: “Reflect, ladies, and write for us what you find.” Calling out to her “dear sister reader,” she mocked the male-authored typology of the “misunderstood woman” and appealed to women with increasing fervor, concluding on a note of female empowerment: “But tell me. What do you think of all this? If men with their mindset had to go through a quarter of women’s troubles or physical pain, if they had to run the same risks as them, would they have the heart to think about anything but moaning and taking care of themselves? Would they think only about love? Despite all of that male braggadocio, which ones, men or women, are ultimately the most courageous?”12
Cross-dressing in Kroumirie, Redux
Delarue-Mardrus’s regular column was short-lived, but she continued to appear as a regular editorial and visual presence, and served on many of the prize juries of both magazines. (The July 1, 1911 issue of Femina featured another elaborate photo spread of Delarue-Mardrus in Egypt, evoking the earlier images.) In August 1910, firmly established as an editorial presence, Delarue-Mardrus revisited some of the photographs that had established her authority; in so doing, she raised the question of the modern woman’s apparel that was a subtext to those earlier images. We know from Delarue-Mardrus’s memoirs that the pictures were her husband’s idea, and she seems to have been little invested, at least initially, in their symbolism. The fact that she was thousands of miles away from where they were being published makes this startling claim a little more plausible. Her comments in the 1910 essay, on the other hand, make the complex relationship to her own image sometimes suggested by her shifting facial expressions finally more transparent, as she deploys a carefully constructed editorial voice that draws upon her now-established celebrity, both as a writer and cultural icon, with a distinctive visual identity. Manipulating both text and image, Delarue-Mardrus explicitly takes control over her visual representation.
Like the wordy captions that appeared in early issues of the magazines, Delarue-Mardrus’s essay provides an extensive commentary on the cover image of her, guiding the reader in what she was meant to see. This image of Delarue-Mardrus in Kroumirie had, in fact, first appeared in La Vie Heureuse in 1905, in the feature “Madame Delarue-Mardrus aux Pays Arabes” (Fig. 3.10a and b). In the photo, she sports pants and what appeared then to be a Muslim headdress but in another context could pass for a boyish cap (Fig. 4.2). The accompanying caption, while not entirely explicit, allows the reader to think that this image was of Delarue-Mardrus’s native Normandy, where she regularly wore pants for their facility during her excursions: “Madame Delarue-Mardrus, who relaxes from her hard work as a writer in the green plains of her native Normandy, wears this picturesque accoutrement for her long hikes around Honfleur.”13 Her essay, entitled “In Normandy” and part of the series “Travel Impressions,” describes the pleasures of dressing en garçon while on vacation and makes an argument for women wearing pants—naming, then, what the cautious cover caption refused to name. The voice is tongue-in-cheek: the delightful, cultivated charm of the “attentive, trustworthy friend” who knows just what her readers want and where they are coming from. Indeed, while the photograph first appears to depict the exotic travels of a mysterious figure, the voice heard is that of one bonne bourgeoise to another. Wearing pants is not a political statement, Delarue-Mardrus assures with delightful charm, but just a simple necessity, and perhaps even a fashion statement. Referring to the pants readers might have seen in earlier photo spreads of herself in the Orient, she notes that they are just as essential to her excursions in the mountains of Normandy as they were in her Tunisian travels. But while Normandy is described for Parisians as being equally exotic to Kroumirie, Delarue-Mardrus also intimates the process by which the exotic becomes familiar—you simply get accustomed to the idea. If you wear pants on vacation, chères lectrices, “people will be surprised at first, but they’ll get used to it,” she writes. In support of this concept she reminds readers that her famous hairstyle had seemed strange and unusual ten years ago, while now it was very much in vogue. Delarue-Mardrus’s logic is a mise en abyme of the strategies of the magazines themselves: through their iconographic insistence, Femina and La Vie Heureuse helped French women get used to the idea of the beautiful, adventurous woman writer as the embodiment of feminine success—an image radically different from both the bluestocking that had preceded and the more contemporary caricature of the New Woman.
Figure 4.2 Delarue-Mardrus on the cover of Femina. (August 15, 1910).
While taking this bold sartorial position, Delarue-Mardrus was careful to circumscribe her comments. “I’m not claiming any male rights (I abhor feminism), but it’s in the interest of convenience, I daresay, that I speak.”14 In her study of Femina, Colette Cosnier reads this comment as an explanation for Delarue-Mardrus’s visibility in the magazine, despite her known association with the lesbian demimonde and figures like Renée Vivien and Natalie Barney. Her avowed antifeminism, Cosnier claims, secures her place.15 But we have seen a far more complex game of shifting performances here. While I would agree with Cosnier that the magazines generally promoted women who conformed to bourgeois norms, rejecting feminism in no way guaranteed entry.16 Provided she did nothing overtly scandalous, Delarue-Mardrus’s captivating, shape-shifting and mysterious image itself seemed to be what ensured her early success, combined with an ability to speak to her colleagues in their own idiom. This success is a testament to the power of celebrity culture in Belle Epoque France. Indeed, I would argue that it was her status as admired, recognizable, but not-quite-knowable wife of Joseph-Charles Mardrus, and her secure place in the monde littéraire, rather than any ideological stance, that initially allowed Delarue-Mardrus to secure her place. One has the impression that she slipped in, in costume, before anyone could quite realize the extent to which she was breaking all the rules.17
We must also consider the history of Delarue-Mardrus’s presence in Femina and the ways in which her 1910 statements stood in contrast to her earlier timidity. In this later iteration, Delarue-Mardrus has reinvented herself. The use of an old photograph enacts this shift: she is literally providing a new reading of an old image. Her rejection of feminism, like that of Myriam Harry, continues the work of displacing gender subversion onto less contentious oppositions, like that between France and the Orient, Paris and the provinces. These clothes are not men’s clothes, the article seems to suggest; they are Tunisian clothes. Not to worry, dear sister reader, none of this has anything to do with feminism. Like Myriam Harry’s, however, this disavowal was backed by an entirely different message, indeed one that implicitly undermined it: that of steady feminine progress towards change, and the promotion of a persuasive, intelligent female voice. That it was a performance is not in doubt. In her memoirs, Harry describes Delarue-Mardrus’s impressive ability to charm the members of the literary elite. She describes attending together committee meetings for the Prix Vie Heureuse at Caroline de Broutelles’ estate, where they would sit across the room from each other so as to balance each other out. Harry writes that her friend “had a seductive manner of approaching them, always knew something lovely to say [. . .] calling them, ‘charming friend’ or ‘my beauty.’” At the same time, Delarue-Mardrus freely expressed her own opinions, and, according to Harry, would curse her colleagues in Arabic if they disagreed with her.18
Delarue-Mardrus’s fascinating intervention thus encapsulates the potentially subversive side of Belle Epoque literary feminism in its subtle indoctrination to new forms of femininity. By packaging what might be deemed frightening or threatening (women wearing pants) in familiar bourgeois codes (what Parisians should wear on vacation), the magazines made them more palatable to certain kinds of women who might otherwise be reticent toward change. Just as significantly, Delarue-Mardrus’s comments highlight the success of these magazines by 1910. Whereas a few years earlier the work of the magazines had been to depict—pictorially as much as textually—the woman writer herself as safe and familiar, now her accepted role as authority figure for this specific audience allowed her to advocate—none too aggressively—for other social shifts. Femina was using, then, the power of the celebrity it had fueled to steer its bourgeois readers in significant ways. This kind of power harnessed and deployed by the mass press has been generally recognized in terms of consumption, and certainly women needed to purchase the magazine in the first place. But as a corollary, Delarue-Mardrus’s writing shows how Femina urged women towards independence and intellectual exploration.
At the same time, there are important reminders that these subtle social shifts were taking place for a particular audience, in a particular journalistic context. In her essay, Delarue-Mardrus refers in passing to a caricature of herself in pants by the famous artist and actor Sacha Guitry. The image, she writes, was meant to be mean-spirited, but she did not take it that way: “it’s actually very nice to see,” she says of her likeness in pants, supporting her own claims that women look good and feminine in them.19 Her comments are a subtle reference to what we will soon see to be a fierce disconnect between the women’s press and the mainstream media around the public image of feminine achievement, and particularly that of the woman writer. What would be a caricature in the mainstream press could very well serve as the norm in Femina and La Vie Heureuse. And yet, these comments also demonstrate that by 1910, Femina offered a new kind of armor against similar attacks, a space in which women could see changes considered socially suspect in other contexts in a fundamentally positive light.
Finally, Tinayre’s and Delarue-Mardrus’s own commentaries shed light on the ways that Femina and La Vie Heureuse exploited the performance of femininity as a feminist strategy, in service of the femme moderne. Delarue-Mardrus’s writing for Femina puts her in a parallel position to some of the magazine’s male editors who took on women’s voices to model a certain kind of interrogation of modern female roles. She was, in many ways, no more a bonne bourgeoise than Henri Duvernois or Fernand Vandérem; but, like them, she used this performance to support the expansion of women’s worlds and world views. Tinayre, on the other hand, was closer personally to the ideology of the femme moderne, but was keenly aware of the challenges of realizing such an ideal. Despite her own implication in the publicity machine of the women’s press, she was skeptical of the means by which Femina and La Vie Heureuse glossed over the new conflicts in women’s lives, and her own novels offer a more sobering engagement of that precise territory.
As we move to the next half of my discussion, we will explore further the gap between the magazines’ own highly constructed sense of their work and audience, and how Femina and La Vie Heureuse were perceived in a wider context. On the one hand, we will see that Belle Epoque literary feminism extended beyond the parameters of the magazines to a web of popular women’s fiction, through which writers engaged in complex issues surrounding changing social mores in more subtle and complex ways than the magazines allowed. In these novels, feminism emerges once more as something much more complex than a yes or no identification, and having it all—work, love, children—seems at once tantalizingly within reach and just beyond the modern Belle Epoque woman’s grasp. On the other hand, we will also see that much of the work of Belle Epoque literary feminism could not be assimilated beyond its carefully circumscribed domain, and that outside of the range of the magazines’ devoted female readership, its work was often unrecognized if not radically misunderstood.
