When future ethnographers want to study what it was like to be a woman in Europe in the decades between the second world war and today, they could do worse than pick up the collected works of Annie Ernaux, who this week became the first female French writer to win the Nobel prize in literature.
Ernaux already describes herself as “the ethnographer of my own life”, yet she has also always insisted that she is an author of fiction rather than memoir. Such is the power of her personal observation that some wrongly regarded her as a historian of her own life. Far from being a writer of the me-me-me school, her gift to literature has been to find the collective in the particular. Her unstinting recreations of her own experience, from working-class origins, have faced down many of the big taboos, from sexual desire and illegal abortion to cancer and dementia. Less solipsistic than Simone de Beauvoir (one of the Nobel’s great misses), she nevertheless followed her in anatomising the rise of the feminist consciousness and the many challenges it has faced along the way.
