Léocadie Penquer

Ma Grand'mère: Madame Auguste Penquer (My Grandma: Mrs. Auguste Penquer), by Marie-Anna Willotte. Undated [1937]. Imprimerie de la Presse Libéral: Brest. Softcover 16-mo, 134 pp.

  

Léocadie Penquer grew up within the small Romanticist community in the city of Brest, in Brittany, and like many (especially female) poets her work was known only from private performances in salons for many years. Finally her mentor Lamartine, the Liberal Christian poet and politician, urged her to publish; she eventually printed poems in the influential avant-garde Parnasse Contemporain anthology along with Gautier, Verlaine, Mallarmé, and many others in 1871. They regularly declaimed her work in their salons and she was in correspondence with Héredia, Banville, Hugo and Saint-Beuve. She and her husband Auguste Penquer were both active in liberal activism and he was eventually elected mayor of Brest; the two of them went on to establish the Brest Museum of Fine Art.

  

Though virtually forgotten, her loving granddaughter (herself a writer) stepped in to prevent her life from being reduced to the few biographical stubs by grudgingly appreciative male critics in anthologies, by publishing this heartfelt and detailed memoir with the cooperation of the local liberal club. Embedded in the biography are texts and excerpts of published and manuscript poems, letters to and from Penquer from her personal archive, a substantial memoir of Penquer's daughter Marie, Willotte's mother, and photographs of Penquer.