Twentieth Century French Writers: Reviews and Reminiscences
1919
A British writer living in France offers her intimate, contemporaneous portrait of a literary movement in its most vital and unstable state. A. Mary F. Robinson (writing as Mary Duclaux) was herself part of the Anglo-French literary world she describes, and her 1919 collection captures writers who were then contemporary, still in motion, not yet fixed into the canon we now inherit. She ranges from Maurice Barrès to Romain Rolland and many in between, sketching a generation of French writers forging something new out of the wreckage of nineteenth-century tradition. But the book carries an elegiac weight impossible to ignore: Robinson wrote during or just after the Great War, and many of the voices she celebrates were about to be silenced forever. The book functions both as literary criticism and as a kind of memoir of a world that was about to end. Most touchingly, Robinson compares her effort to Saint Augustine's child trying to pour the sea into a shell: she knows she cannot capture everything, knows the waters keep receding, but offers what she can, a taste, she hopes, of the movement's flavour and quality.
