The selected texts from Les Bas-bleus (1877) by Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly allow us to gauge the violence of the misogynistic prejudices that 19th-century women writers had to face in their daring quest to carve out a place for themselves in the literary world, while also rediscovering the sharp style—as delightful as it is venomous—of an important and resolutely "anti-modern" writer of his time.
Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly (1808–1889) was a writer, literary critic, dandy (a lifestyle he theorized about before Baudelaire), and polemicist—a leading figure in French literary life during the second half of the 19th century.
