jacqueline harpman i who have never known men

She is not like the other women of the novel, with their memories of the outside world and knowledge of relationships, sex, love and family. The narrator is at the heart of this doubleness, presenting her memories and theories to us from a space of peculiar neutrality. Yes, there are men among the dead, but the novel would look very different were men to make an appearance beyond their roles as guards and dead prisoners.

In fact, femaleness is somehow both central to and almost incidental in this novel. Lumping together female-centred science fiction can be reductive problems of women are still problems that affect everyone living under patriarchy. In recent years we have seen a boom in science and speculative fiction written by female authors, but I Who Have Never Known Men seems eerily prescient, a book from a hundred years ago or a hundred years in the future. Its images are lonely, weird, sometimes horrific, and always arresting. It’s a philosophical treatise as much as it is a story about an alien world, one that prizes the humanity of its characters and places this humanity square, front and centre, even in a disorientating landscape of total strangeness. Perhaps that’s not so surprising, refusing as it does to be put into a neat genre box.

Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men is beloved by a small and intense core of readers, and yet has not entered mainstream awareness. Sometimes we read a book of such singularity and uniqueness, yet such ringing truth, that we wonder why it has not found a larger audience. The recipient of a number of awards, she was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009 and received the Institute of Translation and Interpreting’s John Sykes Memorial Prize for Excellence in 2017. Ros Schwartz has translated numerous works of fiction and non-fiction from French, including several Georges Simenon titles for Penguin Classics, a new translation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince and, most recently, Mireille Gansel’s Translation as Transhumance. I Who Have Never Known Men was her first novel to be translated into English, and was originally published with the title The Mistress of Silence. Harpman wrote over 15 novels and won numerous literary prizes, including the Prix Médicis for Orlanda.

In 1980 she qualified as a psychoanalyst. She turned to writing in 1954 and her first work was published in 1958. After studying French literature she started training to be a doctor, but could not complete her training due to contracting tuberculosis. Her family fled to Casablanca when the Nazis invaded, and only returned home after the war. Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium in 1929.

Jacqueline harpman i who have never known men