Two Faculty of Arts researchers, Claudia Bouliane (Département de français) and Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego (Department of Modern Languages and Literatures), are challenging that legacy. Through parallel research programs rooted in different languages and historical periods, they are uncovering a vibrant and previously overlooked tradition of female friendship in literature—and showing how these relationships reshape our understanding of women’s lives, agency, and intellectual worlds.
Uncovering the Hidden World of Women’s Friendships in French Literature
Claudia Bouliane’s research grew out of a striking silence in Simone de Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe. While Beauvoir acknowledges a “contre-univers” of women’s solidarity and cites English women authors, she offers few French literary examples of female friendship apart from Colette, whom she quotes extensively. This absence prompted Bouliane to investigate—and what she uncovered was a corpus of largely understudied, and often unknown, French writings that depict supportive friendships between women, many written well before the feminist movements of the 1960s. Bouliane also brings new attention to Beauvoir’s mentorship of emerging women writers, a dimension of her career only now being fully recognized through surviving correspondence.
Reclaiming Women’s Literary Bonds in the Spanish Tradition
Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego traces the convergence of political activism, artistic collaboration, and intellectual companionship, revealing women’s friendships as a transformative cultural force. She demonstrated that even under the early years of Franco’s dictatorship—when cultural production was severely constrained—one of the most influential (and rare) novels of this period—Carmen Laforet’s Nada—boldly centred relationships between women. After the regime ended, women writers re-entered the literary field with renewed energy, exploring identity, sexuality, creativity, and, above all, the emotional and intellectual ties between women, relationships that are sometimes explicitly friendship, sometimes deliberately ambiguous and resisting easy categorization. As women secured a greater presence in publishing, they sought intellectual mentors, created their own networks, and actively promoted the work of other women, claiming space in a field long dominated by men.
Shared Themes Across Cultures
A central insight linking both scholars’ work is that women’s literature has long addressed important themes—mental health, emotional pressure, loneliness, care, and changing relationships to the body through experiences such as aging or eating disorders—that earlier readers lacked the frameworks to recognize. Their research highlights not only how these issues appear in women’s writing, but also how intellectual and personal mentorship among women provided crucial aid in navigating them, even in contexts marked by silence or stigma. Beauvoir’s Les belles images and the correspondence between Ana María Moix and Rosa Chacel, for instance, reflect concerns surrounding disordered eating decades before such language existed, revealing the many layers through which female friendship offered emotional, intellectual, and practical support.
By revisiting these texts today, Bouliane and Cornejo-Parriego reveal a literary tradition in which women articulate forms of suffering, solidarity, and resilience that feel strikingly contemporary. In this sense, their research resonates strongly with students: when readers discover women from a century ago grappling with many of the same issues that shape women’s lives today, the distance between past and present collapses. And while female relationships form the emotional core of these works, they are interwoven with themes of war, politics, and social upheaval, creating powerful parallels with the challenges of the present.
Rebuilding the Literary Canon—Together
For Bouliane and Cornejo-Parriego, recovering these stories is not just a matter of literary archaeology. Their work corrects historical exclusions that erased women writers and the preoccupations that shaped their lives. Furthermore, it brings diaries, letters, and so-called “minor literature” from the margins to the centre, providing a more complete cultural and literary history. By showing that women’s friendship is a longstanding and rich tradition, these two scholars are reshaping our understanding of French and Spanish literature.