Spousal Collaborations in Naturalist Fiction and in Practice

Artistic collaborations between spouses were becoming more frequent in the early years of the Third Republic. Literary representations of such collaborations are found in the fiction of Émile Zola (“Madame Sourdis" 1880), Guy de Maupassant (Bel-Ami 1885) and Alphonse Daudet (Femmes d’artistes 1878), with disastrous results in each case. They were shown in a more positive light in the women’s magazine, Femina, and provided a way for women, like Daudet’s own wife and collaborator, Julia A. Daudet (1844–1940), to launch literary careers of their own. The polemics that spousal collaborations inspired reflect changing notions of authorship and gender roles in the late nineteenth century. (MI)