Midis de la Poésie /
Lydie Salvayre & Justine Lequette

Seven women. Seven emblematic women of literature who lived life to the fullest. Their relation to writing is passionate, and for some of them, was a path to suicide. Original and demanding they transcended their personal pain in their works. Their everyday life, which they considered mediocre and without interest, they lived as tragic. But is not this “everyday rut” what marked history? Pre war Paris, the Roaring Twenties, Stalinist Russia. How does one create a work through the life of an author?

Lydie Salvayre takes on this task following in the footsteps of Cioran and Sainte-Beuve, choosing as subjects those women whose books affected her life and her work: Emily Brönte (1818-1848), Colette (1873-1954), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), Djuna Barnes (1892-1982), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) et Sylvia Plath (1932-1963).

Upsetting and scandalous, they bore witness in their way to the world from which they suffered as much as they changed it. Their works are now literary monuments. Lydie Salvayre brings them back to life by writing their stories, their history, their beauty, their outsized actions, their rebellion but also their dark side and their despair.