Madame oreilley maupassant biography

During a distinguished academic career, in which she was awarded a chaired professorship, received prominent teaching awards, and was named, “Chevalier” of l’Association des Membres de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, Mary Donaldson-Evans drew praise for her many scholarly essays on 19th-century French literature and culture. Her extensive examinations of the work of Guy de Maupassant, which began in the late 1970s, include the book A Woman’s Revenge, which led academics to view her as a connoisseur of Maupassant’s work. Recently, her biographical book, Behind the Lines, attracted warm reviews for its exploration of the era’s social and historical circumstances and the hardships and personal sacrifices of military families and was named a 2022 Distinguished Favorite by the Independent Press Award.

In this exclusive interview with Lowestoft Chronicle, Donaldson-Evans discusses her father’s deployment in Italy during WW2 and reveals her fascination with Maupassant and nineteenth-century French literature, the motivations behind her books, and future literary projects.

Lowestoft Chronicle (LC): Was A Woman’s Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant’s Fiction your first published book? What is the backstory on how you came to publish this through French Forum Publishers?

Mary Donaldson-Evans (MDE): The editors of French Forum Monographs, Raymond and Virginia La Charité, also published a professional journal, French Forum, and it was there that I placed my very first article, which happened to be on Maupassant. Since they had welcomed my contribution to the journal, it made sense for me to submit my book to their monograph series. I had not tried my luck anywhere else, and I was thrilled when they accepted it.

LC: The book received high praise in academic circles, garnering many positive reviews. In fact, Allan H. Pasco, a distinguished Professor of Nineteenth-Century Literature, who considered you “one of the United States’ best rea

I read this short story by Guy de Maupassant because I have plans to watch the film with a friend of mine who’s also learning French.

The film appears to have an interesting little history. According to Wikipedia:

Partie de campagne is a 1936 French featurette written and directed by Jean Renoir. It was released as A Day in the Country in the United States. The film is based on the short story “Une partie de campagne” (1881) by Guy de Maupassant, who was a friend of Renoir’s father, the renowned painter Auguste Renoir. It chronicles a love affair over a single summer afternoon in 1860 along the banks of the Seine.

Renoir never finished filming due to weather problems, but producer Pierre Braunberger turned the material into a release in 1946, ten years after it was shot. Joseph Burstyn released the film in the U.S. in 1950.

The short story ‘A Day in the Country’ is in my freebie edition, Original Short Stories Vol 12 by Guy de Maupassant, which I acquired for the Kindle a good while ago.  It isn’t very forthcoming with publishing details.  It credits a producer as David Widget, and mentions translators as Albert M.C. McMaster, A.E. Henderson and Mms Quesada and Others, and also acknowledges ‘Public Domain Books’.  These details are the same as the 2004 edition named as The Entire Original Maupassant Short Stories at Project Gutenberg but my edition doesn’t have the usual yada-yada about the Gutenberg terms of use and licence.  Which it should have if that’s the source of it.

Anyway…

It seems a slight story to turn into an 80 minute film: it’s only about 4000 words and it only took 15 minutes to read, if that.  But as always with Maupassant, there’s always more to it than that.

Monsieur Dufour, an ironmonger in Paris, takes his family for a long-desired day in the country to celebrate Madame Dufour’s birthday.   He borrows the milkman’s wagon; Grandma,

1The short story is almost always praised for its “economy of means”. In the classic short story, this restraint is not to be found in the narrative elements that, to the contrary, we have seen to be built on extremes. Nevertheless the short story clearly proceeds towards its goal with a particular speed and effectiveness: within only a few pages, the reader is introduced to a full universe and knows what is at stake in the narrative. The aim of this chapter is to understand how the classic short story achieves this acceleration of comprehension in the reader — its means being drastically different from those of the novel or what I propose to call the “modern” short story. The antithetical structure, as we saw in the previous chapter, is part of the expedition of the readers’ understanding. However, there are two other particularly important techniques that we will examine in detail in this chapter: the use of preconstructed material, and the device of focussing exclusively on the subject.

2If we are quick to grasp what is at stake in a classic short story, it is because, first and foremost, we are already familiar with the text’s characters, situations and values. The classic short story uses what we could call “preconstructed” material: something “ready-to-understand” in the same sense as “ready-made”. The reader is introduced to a universe whose elements he or she recognises because she has come across or thought of them previously. These elements can be — and are certainly in the great stories — organised in a new, piquant way. But the fact that they are already in some way familiar means that the reader can process them more quickly.

3The techniques used in this process are themselves diverse. The short story can use an historical character as the protagonist — someone famous who needs no introduction to the reader; it can re-use a character that is familiar to the reader from another story in the same collection; it can creat

I am usually reading one French novel -- partly to keep up my French or broaden it, I guess, but mainly because I like reading and French literature. I prefer to read certain French authors in French, rather than in translation, because the language is more meaningful and nuanced to me that way, as much of literature can be not just telling the story, but the language itself (sentence structure, the sound of phrases and words, etc.). I like Flaubert very much, as well as Zola, and Camus is another favorite; probably Gide. I like Jacques Prevert for poetry, and Apollinaire. I also read certain musical reference works, biographies, and history in French because that's the only source I have for them.

Right now I'm reading Le Testament Francais by Andrei Makine. That is contemporary -- he won the Goncourt Prize a couple years ago. He is a beautiful writer, but I wouldn't read it to learn slang, if that's what you want.

I don't read kid's literature (and never really even liked The Little Prince, even though that was the first full-length piece of literature we studied in French class).

I just read newspapers and magazines if I want current events and current usage, rather than literature. It would be a lot more current and is free on the web.