author
Mme. Dufrénoy
1765–1825
Best known as a French poet of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, she also wrote novels and children’s books, building a literary career after years of financial hardship. Her life mixed public success with private struggle, which gives her work a vivid, personal edge.
1 Audiobook
La femme auteur; ou, les inconvéniens de la célébrité, tome I
by Mme. Dufrénoy
About the author
Born in Paris in 1765, Adélaïde Billet Dufrénoy was a French writer and poet who published as Madame Dufrénoy. She became known for poetry above all, though library and reference records also identify her as a novelist and children’s author. Her work appeared during a turbulent period in French history, and she continued publishing into the 1810s and 1820s.
Accounts of her life describe serious money troubles after her husband’s financial collapse, and writing became an important means of support. That pressure seems to have shaped both the quantity of her work and the emotional directness readers found in it. She died in Paris in 1825, and her poems were collected and republished soon afterward.
Today she is remembered as one of the notable French women writers of her era: a poet first, but also a versatile professional author who wrote across genres at a time when that path was far from easy for women.