In Memoriam: Michèle Longino, who passed away on November 21, 2024
Composed by Faith E. Beasley and Ellen Welch, followed by a tribute to Michèle by Faith E. Beasley
Michèle Longino, Professor Emerita of Romance Studies at Duke University, was a cherished and admired member of the seventeenth-century French Studies community for over forty years. We all looked forward to her interventions at both SE-17 and NASSCFL conferences, and remember the stimulating annual gathering of NASSCFL in North Carolina in 2014 which she co-organized when she was co-president with Ellen Welch. A groundbreaking scholar, devoted mentor, generous colleague, and caring friend, Michèle profoundly influenced the field on both sides of the Atlantic.
Michèle’s research on seventeenth-century French literature developed new perspectives on gender and literary ambition, the epistolary genre, representations of the other in French drama, and writing by seventeenth-century French travelers. In her early work, Michèle changed our view of seventeenth-century French literature by broadening the corpus of the writers studied to include women. Her first book, Performing Motherhood: The Sévigné Correspondence (1991), analyzed Sévigné’s letters to her daughter, exploring her strategic self-fashioning as a widow and mother. She was among the very first to take Sévigné seriously as a writer. The next phase of her career helped to establish the study of early modern France’s relations with the Mediterranean and Asia. Her influential second book, Orientalism in French Classical Drama (2002) was pioneering in bringing critical studies of Orientalism to bear on the works of Corneille, Molière, and Racine. Her third book, French Travel Writing in the Ottoman Empire: Marseilles to Constantinople 1650-1700 (2015), extended this work by exploring the detailed histories, personalities, and career pathways of the individual travelers and diplomats who shaped seventeenth-century France's relations with and conceptualization of the Ottoman Empire. She was a collaborator of the Groupe Orient/Occident at Paris IV in 2006-2009 and served as co-president of NASSCFL in 2014. Michèle also shaped the field through her advising and mentorship. Her advisees have made important contributions to studies of women writers, early colonial studies, and Mediterranean studies, among other topics, and many junior colleagues in the field have benefited from her support, generosity, and warmth.
Appreciated on both sides of the Atlantic, Michèle’s work was recognized by numerous research fellowships, including from the National Humanities Center, the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, the Bellagio Center, and by the award of Chevalier dans l'ordre des Palmes académiques by the French Ministry of Education.
It is impossible to overstate the impact that Michèle’s approach to seventeenth-century France has had on her colleagues and her students. We simply no longer teach or view this period of history as we did when Michèle began her career over forty years ago. A dynamic teacher and scholar who collaborated with colleagues in the US and Europe, Michèle could always be counted on to provoke fascinating conversations at conferences and add enlightening contributions to volumes and special issues in the field. Michèle has left us much too soon, leaving a considerable void in the profession. She will be greatly missed.
Faith E. Beasley, Prof. of French, Dartmouth
Ellen Welch, Prof. of French, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Homage to Michèle Longino
Faith E. Beasley
I was blessed to have Michèle Longino as a colleague and as a cherished friend and interlocutor for almost 40 years, my entire career. While today Michèle is primarily associated with her ground-breaking work on France and the Ottoman Empire, for me she was first and foremost a feminist scholar, an integral member of the early group of scholars of the 1980’s and 1990’s in the US who brought to light the rich female literary tradition of women writers in seventeenth-century France. We both had been students of the first generation of those scholars, and bonded over that experience. We shared the same desire to restore French women writers to their place in the French canon. Our first books dedicated to this purpose appeared within a year of each other, my Revising Memory in 1990 and Michèle’s on Sévigné in 1991. One of Michèle’s first academic lectures was a conference paper on d’Aulnoy’s “La Chatte blanche” in the first session ever devoted anywhere to women fairy tale writers, a special session I organized and chaired with Jan Matlock at the MLA in 1987. Michèle’s work on women writers was a provocative and daring venture at a time when founding one’s career on women writers, and treating them as serious writers in dialogue with France’s canonical seventeenth century, was still viewed with skepticism (to put it mildly) in the US and was virtually non-existent in France. Michèle endowed Sévigné with agency as a writer and a woman, which was an innovative, and controversial stance. We both needed and relished the support we gave to each other at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic where our work frequently encounted opposition. Women writers remained at the heart of Michèle’s teaching and research for her entire career, even as she developed other interests. During Covid, for example, she returned to d’Aulnoy and taught a course on fairy tales. Lafayette and Sévigné held pride of place in her classroom. Michèle helped to reshape our field by revising our view of the role of women. By incorporating new perspectives into her teaching, she ensured that this transformation was not ephemeral.
A true feminist and reincarnated salonnière, which I called her during our last visit, Michèle valued conversation and collaboration. She had a vast network of colleagues and friends that she delighted in connecting with each other, across generations and continents. All of us in the field of seventeenth-century French studies recall her carefully crafted and enlightening interventions at conferences. Michèle was always ready to collaborate, always desirous of learning more. After her Sévigné book, she revived the conversations between France and the Ottoman Empire, continuing to expand and enrich the context in which to interpret the works of France’s literary canon. Even as she was nearing retirement, Michèle remained thoroughly engaged with her field. She was acutely aware of the need to support younger colleagues. I witnessed first hand an example of this desire to support our field when we were planning for the SE-17 conference to be held in Iceland. We both had spent most of the summer in Paris. In October, Michèle realized, with dismay and horror, that Iceland was part of the Schengen, and that she had already used up her allotted 90 days in the zone. Michèle moved mountains in order to get a visa for Iceland because she felt so strongly about supporting Toby Wikström who was hosting SE-17.
Michèle’s scholarly interventions on panels, her contributions to volumes and special issues, in addition to her many articles and books were the product of meticulous scholarship and a painstaking writing process. Michèle was a perfectionist; I can’t count the number of times she complained to me about her last book, French Travel Writing in the Ottoman Empire: Marseilles to Constantinople 1650-1700 (2015). She always felt that she had rushed to get that work into print, and constantly found fault with it, especially as compared with her orientalism book. During our many conversations and collaborations over the years, especially during our daily walks in the Luxembourg Garden whenever we were in Paris at the same time, (which thankfully, in recent years was often), I often complimented her, and told her how much I and many others found her work inspirational; I don’t think she ever believed me. Humility was one of Michèle’s many laudable traits.
Michèle’s warmth and generosity, her humanity, her ability to bring people together and bring out the best in everyone she engaged with, students as well as colleagues, was rare, especially when combined with her considerable intellect. In many ways, Michèle resembled the salon women she studied. She was able to bring diverse people and their perspectives and ideas together, enriching the lives of all who had the good fortune of knowing her. As Harriet Stone remarked to me, everyone loved Michèle, everyone was drawn to her. She cared deeply about making others feel valued. She listened, intently. For me, she was a wise confidant who helped me negotiated the rocky roads of academia. And she was fun!
The last afternoon I spent with Michèle illustrates so well what a special, indeed unique, soul she was. The day after she entered hospice, I flew down to Raleigh for the day to see her. I spent the entire trip down from Hanover bracing myself for what I expected to be a tragic, heart-rending goodbye to a dear friend who might not even know I was there. Her sister had told me that Michèle had been in such pain, pain she refused to share even with those around her, that she had opted to no longer accept food or drink in order to pass more quickly. But when I walked into her room, Michèle was sitting in a chair talking on the phone, saying goodbye to Stephanie O’Hara. She was still Michèle the salonnière, asking Stephanie “Guess who’s here,” and then putting me on the phone to make a very emotional Stephanie guess! Michèle was fully in charge and was determined to manage everyone else’s emotional pain. Throughout the afternoon friends and colleagues from the area stopped by to spend time with her. Michèle was the consummate hostess, introducing us all to each other, pointing out areas of common interest, stopping only occasionally to be attended to by a nurse. At one point she even asked me if I wanted a cup of tea! Michèle gave us all the gift of herself one last time. Of course there were tears…. she was not putting on a façade nor were we all ignoring what was truly happening. But while immensely sad, that afternoon was also joyful because it was a celebration of all that Michèle had given to the world. The room was filled with empathy, love, kindness, even intellectual conversation and humor. As I was preparing to leave to catch my flight home, Ellen Welch brought up Francis’s listserv and asked Michèle if there was anything in particular she wanted the notice to say. Michèle looked at the two of us and said laughingly “Write it right now! I want to see it.” In the end, we didn’t because there wasn’t time. Instead, I leaned over to give her one last bise; she insisted, however, on getting out of bed to give me a hug. I told her I would see her soon, and to listen for me because I would continue to talk to her from the Luxembourg.
Michèle leaves a void, all too soon, in the profession and in the lives of her numerous friends, colleagues, and family, a void that cannot be filled. I learned of her passing while I was back in Paris, and spent the following day feeling her presence in her favorite city, retracing our steps taken together in the Luxembourg, going past the door of the apartment she rented around the corner of my own, having coffee where we finished our daily walks, and realizing, thankfully, that Michèle will always be a part of my life. How fortunate I am to have had such a colleague and friend.