A Life of Her Own
A Countrywoman in Twentieth-Century France
Rutgers University Press
Published in France in 1977 as Une Soupe aux Herbes Sauvages, this autobiography of a peasant woman reared in the stony insularity of a tiny Alpine village reveals the unfolding of a formidable person. Carles, born in 1900, writes of her life in the mountains coountry of southern France as comprising "so many different things, funny or tragic, picturesque or cruel." She takes the reader into her beloved Claree Valley where she as a young child in a motherless family labored alongside her father in the fields; it is where her schooling began and where she recognized her intelligence as the key to the outer world. Primitive village life and the patriarchal though loving structure of her family are background for Carles's full, nonconformist life as teacher, farmer, mother, feminist and political activist. The memoir brings to life a captivating woman
Avriel H. Goldberger is Professor of French and Chair of the department at Hofstra University. She is the author of many articles on French literature and of Visions of a New Hero. Her edition and translation of Corinne, or Italy (the first new English edition of the work in nearly a hundred years) was also published by Rutgers University Press
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Translator's Note
Preface
Part ONE:
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Part TWO:
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Afterward
Glossary
