Jacqueline Harpman


Jacqueline Harpman was a Belgian Francophone writer and psychoanalyst.

Biography

Jacqueline Harpman was born on 5 July 1929, in Etterbeek, Belgium, to Jeanne Honorez and Andries Harpman. The couple exported Belgian fabrics and lace to North African colonies and only settled in an apartment after Jacqueline's birth. She was the second daughter born to the couple. Her sister Andrée was nine years her senior. Her father was a Dutch-born Jew, so Harpman's family fled to Casablanca, Morocco when the Nazis invaded during World War II. Jacqueline was forbidden from attending the French High School due to her Jewish origins, so she continued her secondary studies at the Mets Sultan College in Casablanca. There, she met Mademoiselle Barthes, her French teacher, to whom she credits her love for the elegant language of the 18th and 19th centuries. Also while in Casablanca, Jacqueline had to listen to Jacques Doriot's hatred of the Jews. Her feelings during these moments inspired En quarantaine. The Harpmans did not return to Belgium until after the war ended in 1945. A large part of her paternal family was killed at Auschwitz.
Back in Brussels in 1945, Jacqueline finished her secondary studies at the Lycée de Forest. Then, she began studying medicine at the Université libre de Bruxelles. In 1948, she contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to the university sanatorium of Eupen, where she began writing an unpublished novel, Les Jeux Dangeureux. She was bed-ridden for two years in the sanatorium, before penicillin allowed her to resume her medical studies, which she continued without completing. In 1953, she married Flemish filmmaker, with whom she collaborated on the writing and directing of several films. They divorced in 1962.
In 1963 she married the architect and poet, and on 19 August she gave birth to her first daughter, Marianne. On 18 May 1965, she gave birth to her second daughter, Toinon.

Writer, psychoanalyst

Harpman published her first text L'amour et l'acacia and her first novel L'apparition des esprits with editor René Julliard. In 1959, she received the Victor-Rossel prize for her novel Brève Arcadie. She wrote for the cinema, made radio broadcasts, and wrote theatre reviews. In 1965, she wrote her third novel Les bons sauvages.
After the death of her editor René Julliard in 1962, she "put down her pen in the middle of writing her fourth novel". Driven by a desire for change, she enrolled at the ULB, where she undertook psychology studies and graduated with a dissertation on the blind prognosis of Rorschach tests. She worked for several years as a psychotherapist at the Fond'Roy clinic, which she left due to anger at the treatment methods the institution practiced at that time. She then began to practice privately and became interested in psychoanalysis. This led her to begin training at the Belgian Psychoanalytic Society. There, she worked with Jean Bégoin, a Parisian Kleinian psychoanalyst. Starting in 1980, she wrote articles for the Belgian Psychoanalytic Review. Some of her best articles were collected by her husband in the publication Écriture et Psychanalyse, including an article on vampires, another on Proust, and many articles on feminism.
While training to become a psychoanalyst, she resumed writing and published the following novels: La Mémoire trouble,, La fille démantelée, and La plage d’Ostende. La plage d’Ostende received the Point de Mire prize in 1992. Then, she published La lucarne, a collection of short stories in which she revisits the myths of Mary, Antigone, and Joan of Arc, and Le Bonheur dans le crime. This novel takes place in an existing Brussels house: the Delune house located at the intersection of the avenues des Phalènes and Roosevelt. The blueprint of the novel was created in collaboration with her architect husband, Pierre Puttemans. She continued to play with architecture in her work by featuring an architect in En toute impunité, a novel in which three generations of women try to preserve a ruined castle that they have long owned. The architect who bears witness to the story of these women is called Jean Avijl, literary pseudonym of Pierre Puttemans. In 1995, she published Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes (I Who Have Never Known Men). This was her first novel translated into English and was originally published under the title The Mistress of Silence. She then published Orlanda in 1996 and L'orage rompu in 1997. For Le Passage des Éphémères, she asked Pierre Cugnon, an astrophysicist attached to the Royal Observatory of Uccle to guide her in the Observatory to ground her story in reality. He also answered her questions for the novel le temps est un rêve. She did not hide her love of physics and envied the character from le temps est un rêve who is given the chance to live a second life and study physics and astrophysics. She had a large library where theoretical physics books, scientific journals, and science fiction novels were mixed throughout. Several filmmakers were interested in her work, including Gérard Corbiau. He went so far as to propose a fairly complete screenplay for le temps est un rêve, which emphasized the flashback in her story.

Death and heritage

Jacqueline Harpman continued to write and practice psychoanalysis until her death on 24 May 2012 from cancer. She died peacefully at home, surrounded by her husband, her daughters, and her grandchildren.
Harpman's two daughters and four grandchildren all contribute to preserving her legacy. Her daughters have, according to her wishes, deposited her archives at the in Brussels where the archivists will reconstruct her writing desk.
In 2014 and 2015, Emilie Guillaume, a young actress from Brussels, brought Joan of Arc to life in a show called Jeanne d'Arc au Troisième Degré, which combined Jacqueline Harpman's text with a performance of theatre, circus, and martial arts. Jeannine Pâque, Harpman's biographer, was certain that she would have loved to see her text vibrate in this way.

Translations

Since the 2010s, Harpman's novels have been translated several times. Since 2020 in particular, Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes (I Who Have Never Known Men) has enjoyed renewed success, and as of February 2025, there have been 23 translations of this novel. Described as a "Gen Z Handmaid's Tale", the novel gained significant traction in early 2025 on BookTok, TikTok's book reader community, after being republished in 2022. In 2024, over 100,000 copies were sold in the United States alone.

Honors and awards

List of works

L'Amour et l'Acacia Brève Arcadie prix Victor-RosselL'Apparition des esprits Les Bons Sauvages La Mémoire trouble La Fille démantelée La Plage d'Ostende La Lucarne Le Bonheur dans le crime Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes
  • * English translation by Ros Schwartz: as Mistress of Silence in the UK and as I Who Have Never Known Men in the U.S.; the latter title has been retained for all subsequent reissues Orlanda
  • * English translation by Ros Schwartz: Orlanda L'Orage rompu Dieu et moi Récit de la dernière année Le Véritable Amour La Vieille Dame et moi En quarantaine Ève et autres nouvelles La Dormition des amants Le Placard à balais Jusqu'au dernier jour de mes jours Le Temps est un rêve Le Passage des éphémères La Forêt d'Ardenne En toute impunité Du côté d'Ostende Mes Œdipe Ce que Dominique n'a pas su
  • ''Écriture et Psychanalyse''