Plotting To Kill
In seven highly autobiographical French novels from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, fiction brings to real life a simple resolution. These novels plot to kill a female character based on a woman in the author's life, a person who was still alive when the novel was published. Because these novels both depend on and radically diverge from autobiographical reality, they are uniquely instructive about the nature of fiction itself. Reading the life stories in relation to the plots, Mortimer brings into sharp critical focus plot, plotting and the plotable. Always interesting, often revealing, this probing analysis of a special type of autobiographical fiction, with its distinctive treatment of real and fictionalized women, will stimulate and entertain the reader.
The novels are Staël's Corinne, Constant's Adolphe, Gide's L'immoraliste and La porte étroite, Alain-Fournier's Le grand Meaulnes, Radiguet's Le diable au corps, and Beauvoir's L'invitée.
"If all these novelists resort to plots to dispose of a real woman, they do so for a variety of motives, which are here probed in considerable detail. Whether they used the first person narrative, for self-accusatory as well as self-exculpatory reasons, as is the case of Constant, Gide, and Radiguet, or the less directly confessional third-person narrative, as is the case of Staël, Alain-Fournier, and Beauvoir, they sought in fiction compensation and even revenge for disappointments and betrayals in real life, or tried to deal with their own feelings of guilt and remorse." Gita May [review in French Review]
"Mortimer has painstakingly researched her novelists' lives. Her rich analyses of how the actual experience of these writers enters the main plots and subtexts of their fiction bring new insights to these well-known works."
- Mary Anne O'Neil [review in Philosophy and Literature]