Édith Thomas: A Passion for Resistance - Hardcover

Dorothy Kaufmann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801442230 ISBN 13: 9780801442230

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Édith Thomas (1909–1970), a remarkable French woman of letters, was deeply involved in the traumatic upheavals of her time: most crucially the resistance to Nazi occupation and the collaborationist Vichy regime, but also the Spanish Civil War and the Algerian War. During the occupation, she played an essential role in the struggle to counteract Nazi and Pétainist propaganda. She was the only woman in the Paris network of Resistance writers; they held their clandestine meetings in her left-bank apartment.

Dorothy Kaufmann's powerful and moving book is based in large part on previously unavailable material that Édith Thomas, a historian, novelist, and journalist, chose not to publish during her lifetime. A particularly fascinating chapter in Thomas's life was her intimate relationship with Dominique Aury, who wrote Story of O as "Pauline Réage." The astonishing documents made available to Kaufmann by Aury include Thomas's eight notebooks of diaries, which she kept from 1931 to 1963; her fictional diary of a collaborator, written during the first year of the occupation; and her political memoir, to which she gave the disturbing title Le Témoin compromis (The Compromised Witness).

Édith Thomas: A Passion for Resistance sheds light on the historical dimensions of Thomas's life and work and on the autobiographical complexity of her writing, which everywhere illustrates her personal courage. Kaufmann follows Édith Thomas's itinerary as it intersects with that of well-known contemporaries―in particular Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Louis Aragon, Jean Paulhan, and, of course, Dominique Aury.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

"I was impressed and enlightened by Dorothy Kaufmann's book. It is a strikingly well-written and thoughtful account of an ardent spirit, a Frenchwoman whose passion for freedom was perhaps sharpened by the painful constraints placed on her by her own ill-health. She is an intellectual heroine who has stood in the shadow of Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil. This book sheds a light on her very individual path through the minefields of sex, politics, and sexual politics and opens up for us some of the secrets of an uncompromising heart."—Hilary Mantel, author of Giving Up the Ghost

"Édith Thomas—novelist, diarist, feminist, and Resistance journalist par excellence—deserves to be included with Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, Elsa Triolet, and Simone Weil in the pantheon of essential twentieth-century French women writers. As Dorothy Kaufmann’s suave new biography reveals, Thomas’s contributions to French intellectual life in the war years were numerous and extraordinary, and her insights into French society—both during and after occupation—were courageous, unflinching, and intransigent."—Terry Castle, Stanford University

About the Author:

Dorothy Kaufmann is Professor Emerita of French at Clark University. She is the author of The Theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre and the editor of a French critical edition of writings by Edith Thomas, which appears in two volumes, Pages de Journal (1939-1944) and Le Témoin compromis.

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0801442230
• ISBN 13: 9780801442230
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256