Marie Lenéru (1875–1918)

Marie Lenéru was born in the port city of Brest in Brittany to a French naval family. Her father Alfred Lenéru was a lieutenant in the navy and her mother Marie Dauriac was the daughter of an admiral and a descendant of other naval officers. Marie's father died in 1887 when she was only 10 months old. One month later, after having contracted measles, she became deaf and blind. Her mother worked to continue her education, and Marie eventually regained some of her eyesight, enabling her to read and write using a magnifying glass; but her deafness persisted. In 1908, she submitted a short story, titled "La Vivante" to a literary competition organized by the newspaper Le Journal. Her victory in the competition marked her first success as a writer and drew the attention of members of the French literary scene of the period. In 1908, Marie wrote her first play, Les Affranchis, which was published in 1910, but went three years without being performed. Eventually director André Antoine decided to stage the play at the Théâtre de l'Odéon in Paris, and in 1914, she became the first woman to receive the Prix Émile Augier from the Académie française for it. With the success of Les Affranchis, Marie was able to get several other plays staged at the Comédie-Française and other theaters. She also wrote the biographies Saint-Just (1922), about the leader of the French Revolution, and Le Cas de Miss Helen Keller (1908), about her deaf-blind contemporary. At her death during the worldwide flu pandemic in 1918, Marie left behind a diary, which she had been keeping since 1893; it was published posthumously in 1922 with a preface by François de Curel and re-issued in 1945 and 2007. Although her plays are all but forgotten today, Marie was one of the most admired women playwrights of the early 20th century and received consistently glowing reviews. She's perhaps better known today as the subject of research by Suzanne Lavaud (1903-1996), who became the first deaf person to obtain a doctoral degree in France with her thesis on Marie.