Violette Leduc's life seems to have been shaped by her consciousness of her origins as an "unwanted child" — her mother was the classic sad case of a young domestic servant made pregnant by the son of her employers. Violette's absent father paid for her to go to boarding school, but she then experienced another kind of rejection when she realised that her mother had built a new life for herself whilst she was away at school.

This novel takes up that theme of fear of rejection in the life of the narrator, Thérèse: after she has been brutally separated from her school-dorm lover Isabelle, and discovered that the cosy relationship she used to have with her single mother is also gone for good, she takes refuge in new relationships with Cécile and Marc, both of which start to crumble away under the pressure Thérèse puts on them, until Thérèse finds herself alone and pregnant, on the way to becoming her own mother.

A very edgy, nervous sort of novel, but one that's full of powerful writing that draws you into seeing the world from Thérèse's difficult and frightened viewpoint.

The publisher wouldn't print the original opening chapter, which contained a rather graphic description of the boarding-school love affair, so that part is only hinted at as back-story in the novel as it appeared in 1955. Leduc reworked the "pornographic" chapter up for separate publication as a standalone novella Thérèse et Isabelle, which — ironically, perhaps — was later adapted for cinema by a director who turned out to specialise in soft porn. ( )