Au Pied du Mât

First edition, issued without any deluxe paper copies.

Occasional marginal tears to upper part of front cover, small lacks of paper to spine-ends, lack of paper to the lower left corner of the lower cover, and a small snag to lower part of lower cover.

Exceptional presentation copy from one woman writer to another, addressed by Georges de Peyrebrune to Jane Catulle Mendès: "pour mon exquise confrère / pour ma charmante amie / Madame Catulle Mendès / En souvenir / Peyrebrune".

First editions by Peyrebrune and even more so her inscribed copies are decidedly scarce: "it is still very difficult to find Peyrebrune's books nowadays" (Sophie Ménard).

Peyrebrune published this maritime adventure novel at the end of 1898, shortly after issuing with the same publisher a new edition of her tragic and violent Victoire la Rouge. Whereas the latter ends with the drowning of the heroine, Au pied du mât features a female protagonist who rescues her lover from drowning: a striking narrative reversal that restores a measure of agency to the female figures victimised in her earlier works. In 1900 Peyrebrune received the Montyon Prize of the Académie française for the first part of the novel. The sentimental accents of Au pied du mât likely proved more palatable to the jury than her naturalist tales openly critiquing male domination over women. Yet, through the inversion of the traditional role of heroic male saviour, Peyrebrune nonetheless included a discreet note of defiance. Despite the rare official distinctions (she also received an Académie prize for Vers l'Amour in 1897), her versatility between narratives of passion and violence was ultimately judged unfavourably: "She experiments between several genres, and this heterogeneity disfavoured her in regard to literary history as it is arranged in movements, schools and literary aesthetics" observes Sophie Ménard (interview with Robin Duclos and Florence Verreault, Fémur).

Her connection with Jane Catulle Mendès (her "exquise confrère," as she writes here in her presentation inscription) had until recently received little attention. Born Jeanne Mette, Jane Catulle Mendès married the celebrated poet in 1897, and became known for her poems, ballet librettos, and theatre articles. Throughout her career, Peyrebrune cultivated close friendships among her fellow women writers, compensating for the lack of support from her male counterparts; Lydia de Haro Hernández describes these bonds as

"a genuine network of mutual support bringing together women whose origins, convictions, and personal circumstances were sometimes quite different, yet who shared one essential point that formed a bond stronger than any other: their condition as women of letters in a world largely dominated by men. Their correspondence is filled with personal confidences, with the disappointments inherent to a writer’s life, with words of comfort, requests for intercession with this or that publisher, and with the constraints and injustices they faced along the way because they were women."

Exceptionally scarce presentation copy on one of the very few Peyrebrune novels which gained literary recognition during her lifetime.

Peyrebrune, or the struggle to write

A republican and a Dreyfusard, "This provincial woman, who relied solely on herself to enter the Parisian literary world—being neither the daughter, the wife, nor the lover of anyone who might have vouched for her—managed to secure a significant place there through the sole merit of her work."

(Lydia de Haro Hernández). George de Peyrebrune was an integral member of the Belle Époque’s female literary circles, with whom she maintained friendships and active correspondence. She pursued feminist journalism with determination (particularly in Marguerite Durand’s La Fronde) and championed women’s place in literary professions. With Jane Catulle Mendès, she chaired on the exclusively female jury of the literary prize of the review La Vie Heureuse, for which she also wrote articles and published novellas. Known today as the Prix Fémina, the award was conceived as a counterpoint to the Prix Goncourt, which excluded poetic works and “probably would never be awarded to a woman's novel. It was women's prerogative to cancel, with the others, this double restriction” (Hachette, 1907). Peyrebrune devoted a large part of her work to portraying the hardships of women’s lives—herself born of an extramarital union (she received the name of her native hamlet in the Dordogne) and trapped in an unhappy marriage, she gave voice to the silenced and exposed social injustices. Her novels portray the tragic destinies of battered women crushed under the moral strictures of their time (Victoire la Rouge), of disparaged women writers in tones of clear autobiography (Roman d’un Bas-bleu), and also reveal unmistakably naturalist accents, as in Les Ensevelis, on the mining catastrophe of Chancelade. Despite her success and two prizes from the Académie française, she struggled to earn a living from her writing. The early twentieth century marked a decline in her reputation, which ultimately condemned her oeuvre to obscurity and to a life of poverty in her old age.