Em Hogan

Rolex and Ladurée: Constance Debré’s Bravado

Em Hogan, 17 April 2025

Early in Playboy, the first book in Constance Debré’s trilogy of novels about a woman whose life closely resembles Debré’s own, the narrator describes the feelings of intense boredom she began experiencing at a young age:

I gave everyone the shock of their lives when I was four. My great-grandfather the medical professor they named the hospital after insisted on me...

Playboy
by Constance Debré, translated by Holly James.

Love Me Tender
by Constance Debré, translated by Holly James.

Name
by Constance Debré, translated by Lauren Elkin.

Playboy was published in France in 2018 and was seized on by critics, and the public, as a powerful challenge to conservative views on gender and the proper place for women. But it isn’t clear that the novels are anything like as transgressive as their provocations may make them seem.

Daisy Chains: Sappho 1900

Emma Hogan, 20 May 2021

Three decades after meeting the American heiress Natalie Barney, the ‘impératrice des lesbiennes’ in Paris, Truman Capote still sounded starstruck. In the years just after the Second World War he went regularly to Barney’s weekly salon at 20 rue Jacob. Inside the house, a cross between ‘a chapel and a bordello’, with a domed stained-glass ceiling and a...

No Modernism without Lesbians
by Diana Souhami.

Sylvia Beach said that Americans came to the Left Bank for two things they couldn’t get at home, alcohol and Ulysses, but they also came for the cafés, the galleries, the nightlife. Butch women could be found dancing and drinking at Le Monocle at a time when dressing in men’s clothing was technically a crime – in photographs taken by Brassaï they stare defiantly into the camera, hair slicked back, shoulders broadened by boxy suit jackets.

I dream of islands every night: Letters from Tove

Emma Hogan, 24 September 2020

Towards the end of her life, Tove Jansson wrote a novel about two women in love. In Fair Play, Mari and Jonna, two artists, live together but apart. They have separate studios, connected by a corridor. They eat dinner in silence, their books propped up next to their plates. Each night they watch a film, often by a well-known director – Truffaut, Bergman, Visconti, Renoir, Wilder...

Letters from Tove
by Tove Jansson, translated by Sarah Death.

Jansson had many euphemisms for lesbianism: ‘rive gauche’, as if all Parisian women were at it; ‘borderliner’; a ‘new line’, ‘tendency’, ‘attitude’. She had become more discreet since her affair with Vivica Bandler. Some of this reticence was due to her parents’ reaction. Her father tried to ask her if the rumours were true, but couldn’t say the word ‘homosexual’ because it made him so angry.

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