ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Edith Thomas, a feminist thinker. Fascism was on the rise across Europe when the twenty-year-old Thomas entered the Ecole Nationale de Chartes in 1929 to pursue a degree in medieval history and archival studies. In Le temoin compromis she wrote that her "pseudo-Protestantism" and hostility toward the extreme right singled her out in the conservative Catholic milieu. Thomas penned articles on grave social problems in Paris, highlighting among other issues the lamentable living conditions of aged workers and spearheading health and education efforts for impoverished children. In almost all of her writing, she turned to both fictional and real characters with whom she identified but who were at the same time specific individuals uniquely shaped by their particular moment and circumstances in history. Thomas's own particular moment and circumstances aligned perhaps most closely with the main character of the last novel she would write, published shortly before she died suddenly from viral hepatitis.
