Marie Cardinal

In an interview with Elle magazine in April 1998, the novelist and feminist Marie Cardinal said:

Marie Cardinal, writer: born Algiers 9 March 1929; married (two sons, one daughter); died Valréas, France 9 May 2001.

In an interview with Elle magazine in April 1998, the novelist and feminist Marie Cardinal said:

I wasn't born until I was psychoanalysed. Before that, I was never truly alive. I was just a bourgeois young woman who wanted to have children, so I had them ­ one, then two, then three. After that, there was the war in Algeria and as I was born there I felt very attached to the fate of my native land. It was a terrifying personal conflict, too. I really went mad. I could not walk down the street, I was living in a madhouse, shut up in a darkened room. One day, I realised that if I went on living there like that, I'd never get out. So I begged a friend to come and get me out and take me straight to a psychiatrist.

The account of that self-liberation through psychoanalysis is told in Marie Cardinal's Les mots pour le dire (1975), translated into English and published as The Words to Say It in 1984, and reprinted by the Women's Press in 1993 and again in 2000. It is a wonderfully brave and well-written book.

Like several of her works, including its sequel Autrement dit (1977), published as In Other Words in 1995, and Les grands désordres (1987) or Devotion and Disorder (1990), the intelligent and sensitive tale of Cardinal's gradual liberation from both mental and physical torments in a lunatic asylum appealed strongly to the more vocal proponents of "Women's Lib" when it burst upon us in the 1970s.

However, Cardinal wisely dissociated herself from the maniac fringe, and often refused to be known as the "papesse du féminisme" ("female pope of feminism"). Indeed, she drew her more extremist sisters' fire for protesting against the idiocy of some of their wilder manifestations, particularly in the United States.

Marie Cardinal was born in 1929 into a prosperous French bourgeois family in Algiers, where she was educated at the Cours Fénélon, a religious institution from which she graduated to the Institut Maintenon in Paris. In later life her writings frequently denounced the hypocritical pap she was fed about the body and its sexual demands. "It took me twenty years to break free from all those lies and half-lies," she was to say.

She graduated with a degree in philosophy from the Sorbonne, and spent several years teaching in Salonika, Lisbon, Vienna and Montreal. She began a journalistic career with contributions to L'Express and Elle. Her first published work was Ecoutez la mer (1962), the story of a good wife and mother who seeks liberation in adultery. (By this time Cardinal was married, with three children). The book was awarded the first Prix International du Premier Roman for a first novel selected by a jury of readers.

But it was in 1973 that she finally reached a more extensive public, discriminating and mostly feminine, with La Clé sur la porte. This novel is partly autobiographical, an entertaining tale about totally laid-back, progressive parents who encourage their offspring (and friends) to call home their Liberty Hall in which they could experiment with their growing bodies and do whatever they pleased ­ provided it was done in the home. It was made into a film in 1978 by Yves Boisset, starring Annie Girardot and Patrick Dewaere, but it did not meet with Cardinal's approval: she said she hardly recognised her own work in it.

In 1977, she wrote a sequel to Les mots pour le dire, called Autrement dit, in which she describes her childhood and youth in Algiers under French domination, and her difficult relationship with a mother both adored and execrated. She also wrote very frankly for the times about married couples, women's rights, both legal and emotional, the joys of sex without fears of pregnancy and was one of the first women to deride the slavish striving to live up to the unreal physical ideals of top models with hairpin silhouettes and ever-blooming complexions.

Cardinal was also for a time involved in lending a touch of grace to the flat style of ghost writers, a bread-and-butter task of which she was proud. She worked on film scripts for Jean-Luc Godard, and appeared as the mother of the youthful heroine of Robert Bresson's Mouchette (1967). In the same year, she played alongside Marina Vlady in Godard's Deux ou trois choses que je sais d'elle.

She wrote a book about these film-making experiences, one of the best ever written on this theme, Cet été-là (1967). She writes frankly about what she calls the artistic "inhumanity" of Bresson: "As soon as I realised that, I no longer had any fear of him." Bresson, who preferred non-actors, chose her for what he called the "interiority" of her look. But his acute sense of detail exasperated her: "To be the instrument of a man I admire is not disagreeable, but to be the instrument of a fuss-pot, even though some claim the fuss-pot is a genius, is something I just cannot tolerate." Nor does she approve of the way the others act: "It's all a big lie. . ."

Such was the liberated frankness of a woman who had bought her freedom dearly, too dearly to want to throw it away on men she could not respect. Marie Cardinal was one of the first truly contemporary women and the beauty of her stance is a model for all of us, women and men.

James Kirkup