Claire de Duras – författare

'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. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

John Fowles presents a remarkable translation of a nineteenth-century work that provided the seed for his acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman and that will astonish and haunt modern readers.Based on a true story, Claire de Duras's Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised by an aristocratic French family during the time of the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege, she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that suddenly makes her conscious of her race—and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black woman who feels "cut off from the entire human race." As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family, Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe.A best-seller in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras's peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine; the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist; and, as Fowles points out in the foreword to his translation, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind."