Suzanne Lilar

• Name — Suzanne Lilar • Birth Name — Suzanne Verbist • Born — 21 May 1901 • Birthplace — Ghent, Belgium • Died — 11 December 1992 • Place of death — Brussels, Belgium • Occupation — Essayist, novelist, playwright

Lilar's mother was a middle school teacher, her father a railway station master. After having lived her youth in Ghent, Belgium, and following a brief first marriage, she moved to Antwerp, where she became the first woman lawyer, and where in 1929 she married the lawyer Albert Lilar, who would later become a Minister of Justice and Minister of State (Liberal Party). She was the mother of the writer Françoise Mallet-Joris (born 1930) and the 18th-century art historian Marie Fredericq-Lilar (born 1934). After the death of her husband in 1976, she left Antwerp and relocated to Brussels in 1977.

• Illustration — Suzanne Lilar by Charles Leirens, signed, 1950s In 1919, Lilar attended the State University of Ghent, where she studied philosophy and was the first woman to receive a law degree in 1925. During her studies she attended a seminar on Hadewych. Her interest in the 13th-century poet and mystic would play a role in her later essays, plays and novels. Lilar's historico-cultural insight, her analysis of consciousness and emotion, her search for beauty and love are current.

She was a modern writer and feminist who remained highly versed in many areas of traditional western thought (Encyclopædia Britannica). In 1956, Lilar succeeds Gustave Van Zype as member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature. Her life's work has been translated in numerous languages.

Lilar began her literary career as a journalist, reporting on Republican Spain for the newspaper L'Indépendance belge in 1931. She later became a playwright with Le Burlador (1946), an original reinterpretation of the myth of Don Juan from the female perspective that revealed a profound capacity for psychological analysis. She wrote two more plays, Tous les chemins mènent au ciel (1947), a theological drama set in a 14th-century convent, and Le Roi lépreux (1951), a neo-Pirandellian play about the Crusades.

Her earliest essays are on the subject of the theatre. Soixante ans de théâtre belge (1952), originally published in New York City in 1950 as The Belgian Theater since 1890, emphasizes the importance of a Flemish tradition. She followed this with Journal de l'analogiste (1954), in which the origin of the experience of beauty and poetry was guided by a path of analogies. A short essay Théâtre et mythomanie was published in 1958. Transcendence and metamorphosis are central to her seminal work Le Couple (1963), translated in 1965 by Jonathan Griffin as Aspects of Love in Western Society. In writings on Rubens, the Androgyne or homosexuality in Ancient Greece, Lilar meditates on the role of the woman in conjugal love throughout the ages. Translated into Dutch in 1976, it includes an afterword by Marnix Gijsen. In the same vein she later wrote critical essays on Jean-Paul Sartre (À propos de Sartre et de l'amour, 1967) and Simone de Beauvoir (Le Malentendu du Deuxième Sexe, 1969).

Lilar wrote two autobiographical books, Une Enfance gantoise (1976) and À la recherche d'une enfance (1979), and two novels, both of which date from 1960, Le Divertissement portugais and La Confession anonyme, a neoplatonic idealization of love filtered through personal experience. The Belgian director André Delvaux recreated this novel on film as Benvenuta in 1983, transposed as an intense examination of a tortured but exalted relationship between a young Belgian woman and her Italian lover. Les Moments merveilleux and Journal en partie double, I & II were published as part of Cahiers Suzanne Lilar (1986).

• Autour de Suzanne Lilar. Texts of Georges Sion, Françoise Mallet-Joris, Julien Gracq, R.P. Carré, Roland Mortier, Armand Lanoux, Jacques de Decker, Jean Tordeur, Suzanne Lilar. Bulletin de l'Académie Royale de Langue et de Littérature françaises. Brussels, 1978, t. LVI, nr. 2, pp. 165–204. • Alphabet des Lettres belges de langue française. Brussels, Association pour la promotion des Lettres belges de langue française, 1982. • René Micha, 1982. > d'André Delvaux: Une adaptation exemplaire de la > de Suzanne Lilar, pp. 215–219. In André Delvaux ou les visages de l'imaginaire, Ed. A. Nysenhole, Revue de l'Université de Bruxelles. • Cahiers Suzanne Lilar. Paris, Gallimard, 1986 (with a bibliography by Martine Gilmont). • Marc Quaghebeur, 1990, Lettres belges: entre absence et magie. Brussels, Labor, Archives du Futur. • Paul Renard, 1991. Suzanne Lilar: Bio-Bibliographie, vol. 17, pp. 1–6 in Nord – Revue de Critique et de Création Littéraires du Nord/ Pas-de-Calais. Suzanne Lilar- Françoise Mallet-Joris,. • Béatrice Gaben-Shults, 1991. Le Théåtre de Suzanne Lilar: tentation et refus de mysticisme, vol. 17, pp. 7–13, in Nord – Revue de Critique et de Création Littéraires du Nord/ Pas-de-Calais. Suzanne Lilar – Françoise Mallet-Joris,. • Colette Nys-Mazure, 1991. La part du feu, vol. 17, pp. 15–22, in Nord – Revue de Critique et de Création Littéraires du Nord/ Pas-de-Calais. Suzanne Lilar – Françoise Mallet-Joris,. • Colette Nys-Mazure, 1991. Dossiers Suzanne Lilar, dans Dossiers Littérature Française de Belgique (Service du Livre Luxembourgeois) fasc. 3(32): 1–27. • Michèle Hecquet, 1991. L'Éducation paternelle: Une enfance gantoise, vol. 17, pp. 23–28, in Nord – Revue de Critique et de Création Littéraires du Nord/ Pas-de-Calais. Suzanne Lilar – Françoise Mallet-Joris,. • Katharina M. Wilson, 1991, Suzanne Lilar in: An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers, Volume two: L-Z, p. 730 (entry by Donald Friedman), Taylor & Francis, • Colette Nys-Mazure, 1992, Suzanne Lilar. Brussels: Editions Labor, 150 pp.,. • Frans Amelinckx, 1995, L'apport de John Donne à l'œuvre de S. Lilar, pp. 259–270 in La Belgique telle qu'elle s'écrit. • Françoise Mallet-Joris, Portrait of author; Colette Nys-Masure, foreword of Suzanne Lilar – Théåtre, 1999, Collection Poésie Théåtre Roman, Académie Royale de Langue de de Littérature Françaises, • Suzanne Fredericq, 2001, Elegance: A Brief, Perfectly Balanced Instant of Complete Possession of Forms", pp. 14–19 In Elegance, Beauty and Truth", Ed. Lewis Pyenson, New Series Vol. 2, Center for Louisiana Studies, Univ. of Louisiana at Lafayette, • Susan Bainbrigge, 2004, Writing about the In-Between in Suzanne Lilar's Une Enfance gantoise, Forum for Modern Language Studies 40(3):301–313. • Hélène Rouch, 2001–2002, Trois conceptions du sexe: Simone de Beauvoir entre Adrienne Sahuqué et Suzanne Lilar, Simone de Beauvoir Studies, n° 18, pp. 49–60.

• "Une enfance gantoise – Une interview de Madame Suzanne Lilar". In Le Rail, 1977(2): 23–27