Ourika, Édouard, and Olivier

'I have no secrets; my unhappiness is the story of my entire life.'

A key figure in the literary world of post-Revolutionary Paris, Claire de Duras was a writer of exceptional talent, admired by Sainte-Beuve and Goethe, imitated by Stendhal, and influencing later writers such as Fromentin, Ourika describes the discrimination suffered by a young Black woman brought up in an aristocratic French family, her unconscious adoption of this racial disdain, and her redemption by faith. Édouard charts the impossibility of the bourgeois hero's love for the daughter of the aristocratic family into which he has been adopted on his parents' death. In the epistolary Olivier, the two central protagonists, clearly in love, are nevertheless prevented from marriage by Olivier's secret.

Now accepted as integral to French Romanticism and the history of women's writing, the narratives showcase Duras's empathy with the exceptional, the outcast, and the victims of social injustice, providing pioneering studies in race, class, and sexuality. Chris Miller's new translations into English are accompanied by an introduction and notes by Pratima Prasad, highlighting major themes in the texts.

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