The two decades between the First and Second World Wars were a period of political turbulence and social and cultural change in France. Céline and André Malraux gave voice to right- and left-wing ideologies in their work, while François Mauriac and others offered a religious perspective on contemporary mores. Formal innovations came from Surrealism and modernism, and the voices of female, black and gay writers made themselves heard more boldly than ever before: André Breton, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Colette, Irène Némirovsky and René Maran were significant literary figures of the period. At the same time, cinema and radio challenged the cultural dominance of the novel, and within literature the landscape was changed by the beginnings of the bande dessinée and the burgeoning of mass-market popular fiction, including Delly’s romance novels and Georges Simenon’s crime fiction.

This chapter focuses on novels by George Sand, Marcelle Tinayre, Rachilde and Colette, along with a series of lesser-known works from the July Monarchy to explore the relation between gender and the novel in nineteenth-century France. While it would be impossible to write a history of the nineteenth-century English novel without making women writers central to the analysis, the same has not been true for histories of the French novel of this period. The chapter explores how women grappled with their outsider status and the different strategies which they adopted in order to legitimate their voices in an often hostile literary world. While drawing attention to similarities of both content and form in women’s novelistic practice, it also considers and illustrates the diversity of literary practices which characterises women’s writing of the period, and highlights the important ways in which gender shaped separate but interconnecting histories of male and female authorship of the nineteenth-century French novel.