Draft:A Woman's Story

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  • Comment: There is an existing article with the same title as this draft, which is about a different person or different work with the same name. If this draft is accepted, the existing primary page should be renamed with a disambiguator, and this draft should be made primary. The hatnote at the top of this draft indicates what the new title of the current primary should be.
    The current primary page is A Woman's Story. Robert McClenon (talk) 06:33, 20 March 2024 (UTC)

A Woman's Story
AuthorAnnie Ernaux
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench
GenreAutofiction
Publication date
January 14, 1988
Pages112
ISBN2-07-071200-1
Preceded byLa Place 
Followed byPassion simple 

Catégorie:Article utilisant une Infobox

A Woman's Story (French: Une femme) is French author Annie Ernaux's fifth novel. It was originally published in French in 1988 with Éditions Gallimard and translated into English by Tanya Leslie in 2003.

Following Ernaux's La Place, the 1984 Prix Renaudot winning novel about the life of her father, this book is instead centered around the life and death of the author's mother. She recounts her mother's past, from the factory where she works in her adolescence, to her retirement home and eventual hospitalization. She also mentions the plastic bag she finds in her mother's hospital room, in which the staff left various objects and articles of clothing belonging to her recently deceased mother.

Translation[edit]

  • Tanya Leslie, A Woman's Story, Seven Stories Press, 2003
  • (it) Lorenzo Flabbi, Una Donna, L'orma editore, 2018
  • (de) Sonja Finck [], Eine Frau, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2019

Although very similar in theme to her previous novel, La Place, the book was praised by Josyane Savigneau who, in the same year of its original publication, said that "Annie Ernaux a encore gagné en sobriété et en maîtrise" (trans. "Annie Ernaux has once again gained in restraint and mastery of work")[1].

According to Philippe Vilain, writing ten years after the book's publication, "ces récits d'Annie Ernaux brouillent les classifications ordinaires sans jamais s'inscrire dans un genre precis ou se laisser circonscrire par lui" (trans. "these accounts by Annie Ernaux blur the lines of our ordinary classifications, never adhering or confining themselves to a specific genre, which gives her work a unique dimension")[2]. He highlights comments made by Annie Ernaux, saying "her accounts are neither biographies nor novels, but 'perhaps something between literature, sociology, and history,'" ("ses récits ne sont ni des biographies, ni des romans, mais 'peut-être quelque chose entre la littérature, la sociologie, et l'histoire'") and brings up a citation of her saying "I'm trying to describe and explain these events as if they were about another mother, and about a girl that was not myself" ("j'essaie de décrire et d'expliquer comme s'il s'agissait d'une autre mère et d'une fille qui ne serait pas moi")[2].

References[edit]