Leduc and Beauvoir

"she learns to manipulate those who view her works as very good, like Guerlain, who was sincere, ... he offers her a huge amount of money to continue her writings."

De Beauvoir subsidized Leduc. Guerlain, the cheapskate, was willing to pretend to be the benefactor, and Beauvoir knew it would help Leduc to think it was from Guerlain but the whole picture (publication but no promotion, the clubby Gay male publishing camaraderie) didn't add up. Leduc figured out who was subsidizing her but it was all so painful, depressing and she needed the money.

I think Violette was simply expressing herself through her writing & she was writing what she knew--her own pain, her own problems, her own troubled past and insecurities.

While we can see she was a forward thinker in retrospect, I don't think it was phenomenal, in the sense, that she simply wrote what she knew. People have ALWAYS done that, so in that regard, I don't think she's a unique phenomenal writer. What DOES; however, make her a unique & phenomenal writer is the fact that she opened up ALOT about herself as a woman & that would've been risque and very avant garde back then to discuss the things she wrote about, and in that regard, I think she was truly a woman ahead of her time, but NOT simply because she wrote what she knew. It goes much deeper than that & like I just stated, writers typically DO write what they know, or @ least, writers in the past would've typically written from their own life experiences just look @ Charles Dickens, for instance. His characters and the plots surrounding those characters were loosely based on his OWN LIFE. I'm sure there's plenty of other authors from the past, who wrote what they knew, so in that regard, she's NOT unique.

I think we all have a book inside of us waiting to be written, so to speak, and she was simply doing what naturally came to her in the same way a tennis player simply plays tennis.

Happy Valentine's Day!