Marcelle Tinayre, the great forgotten of literature

It is in a collection of texts written between 1896 and 1937 (1) that we can read a text by James Joyce praising the qualities of a French novel published in 1902 by Éditions Calmann-Lévy. What book was it? Of The House of Sin. The author was none other than Marcelle Tinayre whose real name was Marguerite Suzanne Marcelle Chasteau, born in Tulle on October 8, 1870 and died in Grosrouvre on August 23, 1948. Marcelle Tinayre is, let us say it, completely forgotten today, but she was an illustrious novelist, a great traveler, a fiercely anti-communist intellectual and one of the initiators of the Femina prize (formerly the Happy Life Prize in 1904). She sold thousands of copies and frequented literary celebrities of the time such as Anatole France and Paul Bourget, whom she met in the literary salon of M^me Arman de Caillavet.

The young James Joyce therefore wrote, in 1903, in the Daily Express from Dublin…