Professor of French Cheryl Morgan recently published an essay in La Littérature en bas-bleus. Romancières en France de 1870-1914, the third and final volume in a series devoted to 19th-century French women novelists. The series is published by Classiques Garnier.
Morgan’s piece, “Marc de Montifaud : De la comédie au comique lubrique” situates Montifaud’s (née Marie-Amélie Quivogne, née Chartroule, 1845-1912) fiction in the context of the comic in French print culture.
Around 1880 Montifaud turns to laughter in her fiction as she refuses the dictates of gendered writing and attacked the censorship and (im)moral order of the early Third Republic. Taking on sex and laughter, Montifaud deliberately ventures into relatively uncharted and dangerous territory for French women writers, moving from the erotic “contemporary comedy”» of her novels to the ribald humor of her short stories.
