Marguerite Audoux (1863–1937)

Marguerite Donquichote, who took her mother's surname Audoux in 1895, was born into a family of day laborers. Her mother died when she was a toddler and her father abandoned her, and she was raised by an aunt and in an orphanage at Bourges. At age 14, she was put to work on a farm. At night, she took refuge in reading. She fell in love with a local boy, but his parents would not permit them to marry. She moved to Paris and was earning her living as a seamstress and laundress when she developed eye problems that made it necessary for her to change professions. She had been doing some fiction and memoir writing and was encouraged to continue by Michel Yell (Jules Iehl), a friend of André Gide, and a circle of young writers, intellectuals, and artists, including Charles-Louis Philippe, Léon-Paul Fargue, Léon Werth, and Francis Jourdain. The result was a runaway bestseller, the semi-autobiographical novel Marie Claire (1911), which received one of the first Prix Femina awards and later lent its name to the women's magazine Marie Claire. Marie Audoux published stories in periodicals such as Matin and Paris Journal. She wrote three more novels, L’Atelier de Marie-Claire (1920), De la ville au moulin (1926), and Douce Lumière (posthumously in 1937), though none that became as successful as the first.