ABSTRACT
Mardrus tried to help de Castro revive her flagging career as a singer by organizing musical events and performances. During the 1930s both Mardrus and de Castro were the objects of anti-Semitic persecution by the German occupying forces. Mardrus’s books were banned and the publishing house Plon refused to publish her work. As Mardrus began to suffer from impecunity, friends of hers secured her a pension from the Société des Gens de Lettres and generated some money by selling the film rights to her novel Graine au vent (1925; filmed in 1943). Mardrus’s failing health eventually led to her death just as the Second World War was coming to an end. Her work has largely fallen out of favour though in her time she was a prolific writer producing poems, novels, and biographies at a rapid rate. Among the novels now best known is L’Ange et les pervers (1930; republished in a translation by Anna LIVIA as The Angel and the Perverts in 1995), a novel that portrays the life of Laurette Wells, a thinly disguised version of Natalie Barney, and her circle of friends. In the novel the ‘noble’ lives of homosexuals are contrasted with the mercenary nature of bourgeois life. At the centre of the novel is Mario/Marion, a hermaphroditic person whose gender and social identity is fluid due to both a biological and a social ambiguity regarding her/his status. The novel forms part of a whole series of texts from the 1880s onwards that explored ambivalent gender roles and bodily ambiguities. They include RACHILDE’S Monsieur Vénus (1902) as much as Virginia WOOLF’S Orlando (1928) and Djuna BARNES’S Nightwood (1936). Many of Mardrus’s novels were serialized in journals before being published as books, and she enjoyed great popularity in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Her many writings include volumes of poetry such as Occident (1901), Ferveur (1902), Horizons (1904), La Figure de proue (1908), Souffles de tempête (1918), A Maman (1920), and Mort et printemps (1932). She also wrote the plays La Prêtresse de Tanit (1907), and La quatrième Eve (1932). Her many novels include Marie, fille-mère (1908), Comme tout le monde (1910), Tout l’amour (1911), L’Inexperminentée (1912), La Monnaie de singe (1912), Un Cancre (1914), Un Roman civil en 1914 (1916), Deux amants (1917), L’Ame aux trois visages (1919), La Mère et le fils (1924), Hortensia dégénérée (1925), La Petite Fille comme ça (1927), Anatole (1930), L’Amour à la mer (1931), L’Autre Enfant (1931), François et la liberté (1933), Roberte (1937), Fleurette (1938), La Girl (1938), La Perle magique (1940), and Le Roi de reflets (1944). In 1938 Mardrus published her autobiography, Mes mémoires, in which she discussed her passionate relations with women. She also published a biography of Sainte Thérèse de Lisieux (1926), of Oscar WILDE in Les Amours d’Oscar Wilde (1929), and Eve Lavallière (1935).
