Violette Leduc had been publishing works of an autobiographical nature in France since 1945. But, aside from the enthusiastic support of Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and certain other intellectuals, she had gone unnoticed until the publication of La Batarde (1964) propelled her to fame---in part, no doubt, for "the candor in the totally uninhibited descriptions of [her] Lesbian loves. . . . This, the story of [her] first forty years, is a courageous confession and a work of art, . . . a weird mixture of burning, naive, lucid, and unadorned sincerity . . . and of poetic inner monologue" (Henri Peyre, SR).