Emilie Carles (1900-1979) wrote one book in her lifetime, an internationally best-selling autobiography, A Life of Her Own: A Countrywoman in Twentieth-Century France, originally published as Une soupe aux herbes sauvages (A Wild Herb Soup, 1977). Carles was teacher, feminist, pacifist, and political activist despite the fact that she spent almost her entire life in the isolated and impoverished Claree Valley where she was born. She began writing in notebooks as a child, intending to document the story of her life. Despite the inherent difficulties of being a woman entering the educational system early in the twentieth century, she became a teacher who urged her students to read and think… for themselves. Carles became a pacifist out of horror at the mutilation and death of World War At twenty-eight, she married Jean Carles, a freethinking workingman she met on a train. When Carles was seventy-seven, she led her neighbors in a successful fight to save their valley from a proposed superhighway. As an adult, Carles set to work on her autobiography and, towards the end of her life when cancer made it impossible to write, she finished it by dictating to Robert