Marcoline on Boutin, Paliyenko, and Witt eds. (2024)

A familiar tale: discussed and disseminated by contemporaries, the work of nineteenth-century French poet Louisa Siefert became nearly forgotten by the twentieth century, remembered primarily through approbation by renowned contemporary male poets and editors. Redécouvrir Louisa Siefert contends with this male-authorized legacy, engages scholars to read Siefert in her own words, and contributes to Siefert’s path back into scholarly view alongside a commemorative return of Siefert to the public eye. The culmination of a 2021 conference on Siefert organized in her hometown by the Collegium de Lyon, this aptly titled volume enables readers to rediscover—or, for that matter, to discover for the first time—the richness of Siefert’s corpus and the context that informed her thinking and writing. With certain refrains (Siefert’s Protestantism, health, archives, and memoirs) and key contemporaries (Charles Asselineau and Arthur Rimbaud) appearing throughout the volume, the collection’s articles cohere as a constellation of access points into Siefert’s life and works. 

Redécouvrir Louisa Siefert is broadly organized in two parts, starting with the historo-cultural context of Siefert’s writings, in the first half, and shifting into more focused analysis of specific genres and texts, in the second. Co-editors Aimée Boutin, Adrianna Paliyenko, and Catherine Witt open with an introductory overview and rationale by Witt followed by a dialogue between Boutin and Paliyenko on the theme and location of the 2021 seminar on Siefert, as well as on their inquiry into Siefert’s legacy. This engaging dialogue highlights intersections between scholarly activity and cultural memory as it brings readers into a kind of guided tour—assisted by librarians and city officials—through commemorative spaces including archives, streets, cemeteries, and cultural centers. 

The four articles that follow all contribute to the broader scope of the volume’s first half. Hervé Joly provides bio-historical background on Siefert’s family, including their Germanic origins and settlement in Lyon, their faith, and their family business. Joly notes how Siefert shifted the family legacy when she began her publishing career as a way to help make money when the family business went bankrupt: though once internationally known in the silk industry, the Siefert name became remembered instead because of Louisa’s poetry. Drawing from Siefert’s family history, Pauline Morel reads Louisa’s poetry through her Protestantism, arguing that her poeticization of Protestants’ bravery evinces her knowledge of the persecution of Protestants in Lyon. Morel also notes that Siefert learned much of this history, and her family’s place in it, from her Protestant grandmother. Placing Siefert’s poetry at the forefront of a move to align Protestantism and Republicanism, Morel also argues that Siefert’s Protestantism is likely what enabled her education and her entrance into a publishing world dominated by men. In one of the volume’s critical moves, Adrianna Paliyenko interrogates the relationship between history, memory, archives, and poetry via Siefert’s writings. Paliyenko argues that reading Siefert’s archives enriches the study of her poems not because of their biographical details but because of how Siefert’s papers and archival poetry speak to each other. This discovery allows Paliyenko to correct previous dismissal of Siefert as “just” a sentimental poet by showing how the sentimental in her poems often engages with, and indicates her curiosity about, the political stories she poeticizes. Paliyenko also argues that these poems, in turn, serve as a kind of record keeping or memory making of the political moment while also registering Siefert’s own hope to be remembered. For those who may not have access to Siefert’s archives, Paliyenko’s inclusion of the full text and manuscript pages of “Les Papiers de famille” supports this hope. With continued focus on Siefert’s archives and dialogic writing, Catherine Witt argues in her article that these archives also reestablish Siefert’s mentor, Charles Asselineau, in the scholar’s eye. She notes that, if the archives dance around the more personal dimensions of Siefert and Asselineau’s relationship, letters from Asselineau to Siefert’s mother evince both his role as Siefert’s teacher and Siefert’s ability to play with the lessons he taught.

Whereas the first half of the volume provides larger historical and theoretical frameworks for reading Siefert’s work, the second half aims to register and inspire scholarship on the wide range of her literary genres and forms, including poetry, drama, and prose fiction, as well as personal correspondence and diaries. The first three of these articles focus on Siefert’s poetry. Christine Planté explores the challenges of writing on one of Siefert’s most studied poems, “Marguerite.” Navigating the risks of reducing knowledge of Siefert’s corpus to a single poem and reifying the male approbation that popularized the poem, Planté argues for a new reading of Siefert’s inventive use of the alexandrine and the poetic “I,” as well as of her use of the story of Antigone to carve out a women-centered poetic space. Alain Chevrier explores Siefert’s use of the pantoum within the context of nineteenth-century French literary history and argues that Théodore de Banville’s lack of recognition of Siefert’s mastery of the form is a gendered omission to do with Siefert’s more exploratory approach to poetry. Aimée Boutin analyzes the role, image, and evocation of the railway and voyage by train in Siefert’s poems, correspondence, and memoirs, providing a layered analysis of the medical, technological, and poetic terrain Siefert traverses as she explores existential questions and doubts about an uncertain future. All three articles reaffirm the volume’s emphasis on Siefert’s originality as a poet as they reject reductive, gendered notions of women’s poetic and philosophic aptitude and vision.

Moving beyond Siefert’s poetry, the final three articles turn to her wider exploration of genre. Olivier Bara examines the publication, reception, and theatricality of the four plays Siefert published in Les Comédies romanesques, noting echoes of and new directions from the hybrid-genre closet dramas of Goethe, Gautier, and Musset. Bara also argues that, despite contemporary critical rejection of these plays as lacking action, or as “poet’s theater” meant more to be read than performed, the plays are full of theatricality and more ambitiously stage-oriented than even Siefert’s modest preface to the volume avows. Laetitia Hanin, also exploring Siefert’s hybrid-genre writing, situates her novel Méline within the French novel tradition while examining how her lyrical writing crosses into biography, philosophy, and confession. Lastly, to close on a text cited by each of the volume’s authors, Lucy Frézard calls for a critical reading of Siefert’s memoirs, Souvenirs rassemblés par sa mère, examining the text’s cross-genre writing, its place in Siefert’s corpus, and the role and voice of her mother and sister in the text’s construction and dissemination.

Redécouvrir Louisa Siefert offers several new directions into teaching and scholarship on Siefert in one engaging and highly readable volume. Accessible to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, scholars, and general-interest readers, Redécouvrir Louisa Siefert is a valuable addition to feminist scholarship on women writers, which it engages with and builds upon, and a thought-provoking companion volume to Siefert’s writings, including recent reeditions and translations. The collection’s nine figures include an image of a bust of Siefert, maps, manuscript pages, and full poems or ample excerpts. Meticulous footnotes provide rich historical and bibliographic information, additional quotations, and connections between the volume’s essays. The index of names likewise indicates the volume’s cohesion as it guides readers through relevant key literary and scholarly players from the nineteenth century and the present day. Driven by extensive archival labor and passion for Siefert’s writings and legacy, and inspiring us not only to (re)read Siefert for ourselves but to teach, write on, and perhaps stage her work, Redécouvrir Louisa Siefert makes a substantial contribution to studies on nineteenth-century French women writers and to our awareness of the creativity, complexity, and originality of Louisa Siefert’s work.