MONMOUTH, Ill. — Heather Brady, assistant professor of modern foreign languages at Monmouth College, recently authored a paper that was published in the academic journal, L’Espirit Createur, which is dedicated to the study of French literature.

While studying on a Mellon Fellowship two years ago at Chicago’s Newberry Library, Brady discovered the correspondence between a white Creole family – the Rouvrays – living in Saint-Domingue (today’s Haiti) and their daughter, who lived in Europe during the French and Haitian Revolutions. The mother of the Rouvray family turned out to be the aunt of a famous French author – Claire de Duras.

Reading the letters enabled Brady to shed new light on Duras’ 1823 novel "Ourika," which is often read in French classes as an exemplary model of abolitionism. Her paper is titled "Recovering Claire de Duras’s Creole Inheritance: Race and Gender in the Exile Correspondence of her Saint-Domingue Family."

"I am very interested in women’s ways of writing about race at this particular moment in French colonial history, and these letters turned out to be a wealth of information about white women’s compassion or empathy for slaves, an issue which is currently quite controversial in French scholarship," said Brady. "While early feminists believed that white women had a deeper understanding of slaves’ suffering than white men, these letters reveal the myths at the heart of our understanding of race and gender at this time – that women were at times equally racist in their language and their treatment of slaves."

Since returning to print in 1979, "Ourika" has become a favorite text for readers of 19th-century French literature. Scholars have written prolifically about the novel’s politics, yet important questions remain about its position on colonialism and slavery. With this new information on the author’s multifaceted Creole inheritance and dangerous ideological position as a participant in colonial history, a slaveholder and a resilient émigré, "Ourika" can be read in a new light.