Marcelle Tinayre (1870–1948)

Marcelle Tinayre was born Marguerite-Suzanne-Marcelle Chasteau at Tulle, France, a daughter of Émile Chasteau, an art designer, and his wife Louise, a teacher. Her younger sister Catherine became an art critic under the pseudonym Lucienne Florentin. She began writing as a child, encouraged by her grandmother, who wrote poems, and her mother who wrote novels and treatises on teaching. In 1884, she published a book under the pseudonym Charles Marcel, and then published Avant l'amour, her first novel under her own name, in 1897. In 1889, she married Jean-Julien Tinayre, a painter and engraver, with whom she had four children. In 1902, she published her most-praised work, La Maison du péché (The House of Sin). In 1904, she was one of the co-founders of the Prix Femina (then called La Vie heureuse). She made disparaging remarks about the Légion d'honneur in the press in 1908 and was subsequently denied the decoration. She traveled extensively and lectured in Turkey, Italy, England, Algeria, Tunisia, Scandinavia and the USA. In addition to her dozens of novels, she wrote articles for the daily newspapers. From 1941 to 1944, she wrote for Voix françaises, a Pétainist journal.