Benoîte Groult (1920–2016)

Benoîte Groult was born in Paris, a daughter of André Groult, an interior designer who became famous during the Art Déco period, and his wife Nicole Poiret, an acclaimed couturier and sister of Paul Poiret. Theirs was a fashionable upper-class household. She was 19, and her younger sister Flora was just 15, when World War II and the Nazi Occupation of France began. The two sisters kept diaries throughout the war; they were first published together in 1962, under the title Journal à quatre mains, which became a bestseller. Benoîte attended the Sorbonne, studying Latin and Greek, and taught at the Cours Bossuet before going to work as a journalist for French television. She co-wrote two successful novels with Flora, Le féminin pluriel (1965) and Il était deux fois (1967). Independently, she eventually published 20 novels, including the bestsellers La Part des choses (1972), Ainsi soit-elle (1975), Les Trois-Quarts du temps (1983), and La Touche étoile (2006), as well as numerous essays on feminism. Her controversial 1988 novel Les vaisseaux du cœur was adapted into a 1992 film called Salt on Our Skin. With Claude Servan-Schreiber, in 1978 she founded the feminist F Magazine, whose editorials she wrote. From 1982, she was a member of the jury of the Prix Femina. She was the subject of several documentary films, including Une chambre à elle: Benoîte Groult ou comment la liberté vint aux femmes and Benoîte Groult, le temps d'apprendre à vivre. She was married three times: in 1944 to Pierre Heuyer, a medical student who died a few months later of tuberculosis; in 1946 to journalist Georges de Caunes, with whom she had two daughters; and in 1952 to writer Paul Guimard, with whom she had a daughter. In 2008, she published her autobiography, Mon evasion (English translation: My Escape).