ABSTRACT
The official portrait of the utopian feminist and polemical journalist Céline Renooz, says much about her. What makes Renooz's case so curious, is not her image but her correspondence. What Renooz's work suggests is her sustained effort to shape a stable, discursive identity by the careful collection and reconstruction of her personal letters. Her first book, on the origins of animals5 was an original critique of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Instead of tracing the origin of species by the established conventions of natural history, Renooz proposed examining evolution in light of recent work in embryology. Nowhere is this truism more tragically apparent than in Renooz's obsession with Mathias Duval. Duval's death represented the truth of her ideas and the virtue of her ideals. Here Renooz's correspondence demonstrates the curious success of her gendered politics.
