Jeunes filles en serre chaude

{{short description|1934 novel by Jeanne Galzy}}

{{italic title}}

File:Jeunes filles en serre chaude.jpg

{{lang|fr|Jeunes filles en serre chaude}} (Young girls in a hothouse) is a 1934 novel by the French author Jeanne Galzy. Its protagonists are young women at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles in Sèvres, a suburb of Paris, at the time a girls-only school. The school, which Galzy herself attended, trained girls especially as teachers for the secondary education system.{{cite book|last=Fox|first=Robert|title=The Savant and the State: Science and Cultural Politics in Nineteenth-Century France|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=MFaPNfoXAIwC&pg=PA288|year=2012|publisher=JHU Press|isbn=9781421405223|page=288}} The background for the events in the novel is the 50th anniversary of the secondary school system for women;{{cite book|last=Milligan|first=Jennifer E.|title=The Forgotten Generation: French Women Writers of the Inter-war Period|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=df26PdTknf4C&pg=PA97|year=1996|publisher=Berg|isbn=9781859731185|pages=97–98}} it is one of many French novels and other (autobiographical) texts of the period in which authors' school and university experiences were recounted.{{cite journal|last=Gerbod|first=Paul|year=1954|title=L'Université et la littérature en France de 1919 a 1939|journal=Revue d'histoire moderne et contemporaine|volume=25|issue=1|pages=129–44|jstor=20528445|language=French|doi=10.3406/rhmc.1978.1009}}

Following Burnt Offering (1929) and Les Démons de la solitude (1931), it is the third novel by Galzy (this one with a "seductive title"{{cite book|last=Paul|first=Harry W.|title=Henri de Rothschild, 1872-1947: Medicine and Theater|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=_i8g_3UCUsQC&pg=PA47|year=2011|publisher=Ashgate|isbn=9781409405153|pages=47 n.47}}) to explore lesbian desire.{{cite book|last=Waelti-Walters|first=Jennifer R.|title=Damned women: lesbians in French novels, 1796-1996|year=2000|publisher=McGill-Queen's Press|isbn=978-0-7735-2110-0|pages=99–102|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=41rFOwe2RoQC&pg=PA99}}{{cite book|last=Tamagne|first=Florence|title=Histoire de l'homosexualité en Europe: Berlin, Londres, Paris, 1919-1939|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=6x8bAAAAYAAJ|year=2000|publisher=Éd. du Seuil|language=French|isbn=9782020348843|access-date=14 June 2013}} The intergenerational love in the novel (between a teacher, Gladys Benz, and a student, Isabelle, told from Isabelle's point of view) is likewise a reflection of Galzy's own experiences.{{cite book|last=Hawthorne|first=Melanie C.|editor=Melanie C. Hawthorne|title=Contingent Loves: Simone De Beauvoir and Sexuality|chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=luqj3g6S0RYC&pg=PA70|year=2000|publisher=University of Virginia Press|isbn=9780813919744|pages=[https://archive.org/details/contingentloves00mela/page/55 55–83]|chapter=Leçon de Philo/Lesson in Love: Simone de Beauvoir's Intellectual Passion and the Mobilization of Desire|access-date=14 June 2013|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/contingentloves00mela/page/55}} The school was reputed to be a "breeding ground of homosexual relationship", and had earlier been the subject of a novel exploring same-sex desire, Les Sévriennes (1900) by Gabrielle Reval.{{cite book|last=Tamagne|first=Florence|title=A history of homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939|year=2006|publisher=Algora|isbn=978-0-87586-355-9|page=139|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=PW1GjP0_6Y4C&pg=PA139}}

Like most of Galzy's novels, {{lang|fr|Jeunes filles}} is neglected by modern readers, though it did attract some attention at the time of publication. A French reviewer remarked that the novel shows that "overworked brains" sometimes fall prey to "dangerous aberrations".{{cite journal|last=Schinz|first=Albert|year=1935|title=L'Année littéraire mil neuf cent trente-quatre|journal=The Modern Language Journal|volume=19|issue=8|pages=561–70|jstor=315370|language=French|quote=Ce sont les étudiantes de l'École de Sèvres dont les cerveaux surmenés causent parfois des aberrations dangereuses.|doi=10.2307/315370}} A brief note in The Modern Language Journal remarked that "trivial but intensely human emotional reactions are realistically depicted",{{cite journal|year=1935|title=Recent French Books|journal=The Modern Language Journal|volume=20|issue=1|pages=45–50|jstor=315502|doi=10.1111/j.1540-4781.1935.tb02653.x}} and the 1935 New International Year Book warned that the students depicted in the book have a "strong emotional reaction of an undesirable nature".{{cite book|title=The New International Year Book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=bolMAAAAMAAJ|year=1935|publisher=Dodd, Mead and Company|page=255}} The book is no longer in print; passages from it were anthologized in a 1985 collection of erotic women's literature.{{cite book|editor1-last=Brécourt-Villars|editor1-first=Claudine|title=Ecrire d'amour: anthologie de textes érotiques féminins, 1799-1984|year=1985|publisher=Éd. Ramsay|isbn=9782859564292}}