Claire de Duras

(1777 - 1828)

Born into a plantation-owning family, Claire de Duras became a duchess in the court of Louis XVIII, though she was influenced by her father’s progressive political views and ran a prominent literary salon during and after the French Revolution. Around 1820, Duras recounted at a meeting a story she had heard about a young Senegalese girl rescued from the slave trade and brought up in the home of French nobility. The salon’s writers encouraged her to write it down. “By noon the next day,” one friend recalled, “half of the novel was written.” The finished work, Ourika, was originally published anonymously; it is the first French novel to feature a black woman with the layered psychology befitting its subject.