Midway through Olivia, headmistress Mlle Julie (Edwige Feuillère), going to bed, notices light under the door of one of her pupils, Olivia. She enters the room to find Olivia reading poetry, and sits on the bed beside her, her long white hand cradling Olivia’s head and playing with her hair. She knows the poem Olivia is reading by heart. Their faces are close; the music seems to cue a kiss. Instead Mlle Julie settles Olivia down to sleep, like a mother with her child. It is only when the girl’s eyes are closed that she kisses her, and even then just on her cheek. Olivia thrills at the touch, covering Julie’s hands in kisses. The teacher pulls away. She blows out the candle and wishes Olivia good night.
In 1949 the Hogarth Press published the novella Olivia, by Olivia, pseudonym of the writer and translator Dorothy Bussy. It is dedicated “to the beloved memory of V.W.”, Virginia Woolf, who was one of Bussy’s close friends. It bears an epigraph, in French, from the 17th-century writer La Bruyère: “One only loves well once, the first time; the loves that follow are less involuntary”.i Olivia delivers an expression of pristine feeling, holding the involuntary ardour of a girl’s first love. That this account of first love is an unabashed queer drama is a novelty.ii But it is the novel’s take on intergenerational love, and female education, that is so riveting. Both Bussy, and Jacqueline Audry after her, who in 1950 adapted Olivia for the screen, show a world where education and intellectual curiosity, for girls, go hand in hand with emotional and erotic infatuation. If this seems unsettling in the current feminist moment, where misconduct and consent are rightly on the agenda, it is also exactly this focus on a form of maternal eroticism that makes both the book and the film distinctive even among other lesbian representations.
An English schoolgirl falls in love with her French headmistress at a boarding school in Fontainebleau. Mlle Julie is inspired by the real educator and lesbian Marie Souvestre, whose schools, Les Ruches in France and later Allenswood in Wimbledon, Bussy attended. Souvestre was a friend of Bussy’s mother, and Bussy’s sister, Joan Pernel Strachey, also studied with Souvestre, specialised in French and went on to be Principal of Newnham College, a women’s college in Cambridge, while Bussy herself later taught at Allenswood. If she later married French painter Simon Bussy, the novella, a lesbian love story, is an apparently closely autobiographical work. Bussy honours real events from her adolescence, and shows the unique and formative nature of first love.iii The way that she makes lesbian love part of an education in literature and art is part of the work’s feminist legacy. Olivia makes the girls’ school a cradle of love. Such feeling is caught exactly in Audry’s film, which puts Olivia at its heart, sharing her point of view quite literally for much of the narrative.
Audry, as Judith Mayne points out, was “virtually the only woman working in the [French] studio system of the 1950s”.iv For Mayne, it is likely Audry was overlooked by the next generation of critics and filmmakers because “the explorations into gender and sexuality so evident in her work simply had no frame of reference for the Cahiers folks”.v But interest in her work is growing. In 2015, Brigitte Rollet published a monograph on Audry, and attention is being given to her role as assistant director to G.W. Pabst and Max Ophüls at the end of the 1930s, and to her adaptations of novels by that erotic mother of French women’s writing, Colette.vi In 1948 Audry made an adaptation of Gigi in 1948 (ten years before Leslie Caron starred in the Vincente Minelli musical version), following it with Minne (1950), and Mitsou (1956). Nestled amongst these films is Olivia, Audry’s classic, which almost seems to spring from that Colette heartland where love, break with convention and female freedom are all bound up. Olivia was shown in a feminist screening in London sometime in the 1980s – I went as a schoolgirl.vii I didn’t see it again for years until Carrie Tarr miraculously passed on a copy. And now, finally, it is in circulation again.
The Hogarth Press imprint of the novella has a cover designed by Duncan Grant with a drawing of carriages in the Place de la Concorde in Paris. The sky behind is a wash of lilac. Audry’s Olivia begins and ends with carriage rides. When Olivia (Marie-Claire Olivia) arrives at the legendary school of Les Avons it is as if she is entering a fantasy realm set apart from the rest of the world. The school building is a chateau surrounded by copious parks and gardens, with statues of nymphs and the goddess Artemis. The journey Olivia makes here is both affective and existential. She is an ingénue. She has left a restrictive school in England for this paradise. For English girls like her, France – Frenchness – represents sensual pleasure, freedom and desire. It also turns out that this world is not entirely unknown to her. Mlle Julie, and her companion Mlle Cara, knew Olivia’s mother in Switzerland and met Olivia as a baby. Olivia, although neither the most beautiful nor most talented of the girls, immediately becomes a favourite, the only girl with a sumptuous bedroom immediately opposite the rooms of her schoolmistresses.
Julie is played by stage and screen star Edwige Feuillère. The headmistress is dashing, with a deep, velvety voice, and an aura of authority that make her a sister to Garbo’s Christina. Although decades separate Julie and Olivia, the lovelorn perspectives of both novella and film, show no hesitation about Julie as object of passion. For this reason neither entertains any overt criticism of Julie, leaving the reader and viewer to wonder about her play of power in retrospect. Mlle Julie is also an intellectual guide, reading lines from Racine to the girls. These moments are far from conventional classroom scenes: Julie reads in her sitting room, the fire behind her, and the girls cluster around her in evening dresses. Olivia, who is sitting by the door, stands to answer Mlle Julie’s questions about Racine’s Andromaque. When Olivia answers correctly, Mlle Julie invites her to come and sit close on the chair beside her. As Olivia moves across the room, the shot is taken from her point of view, conjuring the thrill of this proximity. Olivia’s shadow falls across Mlle Julie and for a moment she seems troubled by the girl. Their closeness, and flirting, is remarked on by the rest of the room. Olivia stays behind after the reading and the conversation turns from Racine to Olivia herself. She listens as they sit by the fire, then takes Olivia’s hands as she gestures to her to leave. The following morning, Olivia, clearly in love, throws open the curtains of her bedroom letting the sun flood in. She recounts in the book: “It was the term that begins in spring and ends in summer, and I felt indeed as if I were coming to life with the rest of the world”.viii
The pursuit of love and knowledge continues as Olivia is given individual attention by Mlle Julie. She seems at once a pupil, a favourite daughter, and an object of desire in this erotic drama. Taking Olivia in hand she takes her to Paris, in the carriage, to show her artworks in the Louvre museum. They stop before Watteau’s Voyage to Cythera (1717), and observe the elegant figures departing for the island of the Goddess of Love. Julie tells Olivia that in this picture there are no bodies but “the evanescence of lights and colours”.ix Their gallery visit is followed by tea at Rumpelmayer’s (now Angelina’s) on the rue de Rivoli, not far from the Louvre, where Bussy once hoped to have tea with Virginia Woolf.x The tête-à-tête over drinking chocolate and frangipane edges the trip over from educational journey to romantic tryst. Olivia avows in the novella: “On golden days Mlle Julie took me to Paris alone”.xi
The impression of Mlle Julie as queerly positioned between teacher, mother, and lover is further enhanced by the costume and design of the film. From the start she is dressed in a cloud of lace that, she explains, is from Chantilly. Despite Mlle Cara’s presence, she seems like a glamorous bachelor, masculine and feminine all at once, in décolleté dresses, rustling through the corridors of the school with her bustle and long-trained skirts. Both the film’s mise-en-scène and design, the wide, curved staircase and confectionary muslins and drapes, establish her dominion. Her eyes closed, Olivia presses her face into Julie’s lush cape. Later, Mlle Julie kisses the bare neck of Cécile, a beautiful American heiress, another of the girls, when she appears at a ball. Olivia, jealous, looks on. At the same costume ball, Mlle Julie and Mlle Cara, sometime lovers, lead off the dancing in an astonishing, camp, all-female extravaganza. In all its frothiness, Olivia viewed now is exquisite and disturbing. It’s unusual for its time – and for now – in showing such an exclusively female world. It champions female education, as seen in the range of literature and art Olivia learns about, and the value of such an education seems to be borne out in the real links between its girls’ school, Souvestre’s real academies, and women’s vocations, in Bussy’s case, as writer and translator, and in her sister’s as future academic. The lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney was another alumna of Les Ruches. Olivia claims this intellectual blossoming as also queerly erotic. But this world is riven with abuses of power, partisanship, rivalries and favouritism, tainted with hysteria, migraine, and profuse tears.xii Sometimes it seems that film, and novel, risk both reproducing stereotypes about all female communities and overlooking abuses that have subsequently been called out. Olivia in 1950 looks back to a 19th-century world, but the girls’ school survived as homoerotic space in Audry’s twentieth-century France. Consider Simone de Beauvoir’s closeness with the young girls to whom she taught philosophy, subsequently criticised by her biographers. (Audry’s sister, another Colette, was a friend of Beauvoir, and extracts from her novels, notably writing on girlhood and sexuality, appear in The Second Sex).xiii
Looking to find hidden treasures by female predecessors, we encounter beautiful, precious, flawed, and sometimes compromised stories. These may yet be part of our own affective lives, and are surely important in understanding histories of sexuality. For Kyle Stevens, considering the film from a contemporary queer perspective, Olivia still feels “so free, so fresh”.xiv For me, Audry remains bold and exploratory about intergenerational love and its genealogies, imagining a school as a strange female family world. If she is inspired by Colette, she also looks forward to Chantal Akerman and her further feminist reflections on mothers and lovers. The audacity and sensuality of the film, its imagining of female education and lesbian love, deserve a second glance.
Emma Wilson teaches French at the University of Cambridge. Her latest books are Chantal Akerman: Afterlives (co-edited with Marion Schmid, 2019) and The Reclining Nude: Agnès Varda, Catherine Breillat and Nan Goldin (2019).
i L’on n’aime bien qu’une seule fois: c’est la première. Les amours qui suivent sont moins involontaires’. Translation my own. Olivia, Dorothy Bussy, London: Hogarth Press, 1949, p. 20. ii Both Olivias present a story of lesbian first love with the blow-by-blow detailing of bliss and pain, of, say, Turgenev’s 1860 novella First Love. iii Marjorie Garber writes: ‘This, then, is a true account, however filtered and fictionalized’ in a discussion of Olivia, the novella, in relation to Mädchen in Uniform (1931), Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 331. iv Judith Mayne, Framed: Lesbians, Feminists and Media Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 60. v Ibid., p. 60. vi Brigitte Rollet, Jacqueline Audry: La femme à la caméra (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). vii I can’t remember where the screening was held and have not been able to uncover details. The book was important to me in my teens when I was discovering my own sexuality. viii Olivia, Dorothy Bussy, London: Hogarth Press, 1949, p. 20. ix Olivia, p. 37. x Virginia Woolf, A Change of Perspective: The Letters of Virginia Woolf 1923-1928, edited by Nigel Nicolson (London: Chatto & Windus, 1977), p. 144. See also Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996) for brief evocation of the friendship between Woolf and Bussy. xi Olivia, p. 36. xii If this school world in Audry’s film is bucolic and ecstatic, it also looks forwards to the darker imagining of a girls’ school by Lucile Hadžihalilović, following Wedekind, in Innocence (2004). This is felt in particular as it touches on sickness and suicide. xiii I look forward to future work on this area by Sherilyn Hellberg who gave a brilliant paper, ‘On the Bodily Education of Young Girls: Colette, Wedekind, Jaeggy’ at ‘The Queer Art of Feeling’, a conference held in Cambridge in May 2019. xiv Kyle Stevens, ‘Bewitched by Olivia’, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/bewitched-by-olivia/ (accessed 23 February 2020).
