Conversations: The Rediscovery of I Who Have Never Known Men

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Elah: Welcome to the Lost Women of Science podcast, where we explore the stories of women whose work has been overlooked, and in the case of our episode today, rediscovered. I'm your host, Elah Feder.

So today we're talking about a novel that was nearly forgotten, but then almost three decades later, it was given a second life.

I Who Have Never Known Men is a speculative fiction book that was first published in 1995 by a Belgian writer and psychoanalyst named Jacqueline Harpman. The novel follows a young girl who's been imprisoned with a group of women inside a windowless bunker. They have little memory of how they got there and no contact with the outside world besides the guards that silently watch them.

The novel follows a nameless young girl imprisoned with a group of women in a windowless bunker. They have little memory of how they got there and no contact with the outside world, besides male guards who silently watch them. They don’t even know where they are. It could be this planet or another planet.

Okay, that's the very basic concept. I'm not gonna say too much more, but if you haven't read it, note that this episode does contain a couple of spoilers, so you've been warned. 

In the world of speculative and science fiction, this novel is a bit of an oddity. There's no plague, no killer robots. There's really no explanation at all for why these women are in captivity.

Instead, at the core is this really fantastic kind of thought experiment. What happens to a human mind in the absence of freedom, beauty, or even a really basic understanding of what's happening? And actually, more importantly, what can a human mind do in those circumstances?

For a good part of the book, you’re just watching this bizarre, claustrophobic life unfold. The women talk, they argue. They sew their own clothes using thread made of their hair. They cook basic meals. And they do this without ever touching each other, one of the cardinal rules of this prison. 

But here’s where it gets interesting. Our protagonist is the one young girl in the group, no name given. And she starts to take action. One of her earliest discoveries is that she can measure time. Despite living in a bunker with no windows or clocks, she can count her own heartbeats. And in the context, of this very vivid, awful reality, these kinds of wins… are absolutely exhilarating. Even more exciting things come later…but those would be major spoilers.

Back in 1995 in Belgium and France, the original French version was well-reviewed. It was even a finalist for a French literary prize. And so in 1997, it got an English translation, which completely flopped. It's said to have sold about 30 copies in 30 years. Jacqueline Harpman was basically an unknown in the English-speaking world. Harpman died in 2012 at the age of 82, so she didn't get to see what happened next.

Her novel was resurrected. In the past few years, the book has gone viral. 

Tik Tok clip: I finally read I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman in like two and a half, three hours last night. 

Tik Tok clip: I am gonna attempt to put my feelings into words about this book because it low-key just rocked my world. I had no idea what to expect going into this other than people seem to either really love it or really hate it. 

Tik Tok clip: No hate, but I always say that this book achieves what Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale set out to do in a much more visceral way. 

Tik Tok clip: I don't think I've ever been more confused, but also intrigued, but also in shock, but also staring at a wall thinking about a book in a very, very long time.

Elah: Later in the show, we'll hear from Susan Watkins, a professor of women's writing, to help us understand why this book is resonating now, especially with young women, but also what Harpman might have been trying to tell us. But first, we are lucky enough to be speaking to the translator of the book, Ros Schwartz.

Ros was the original translator back in 1997, and then in 2022, with decades more experience under her belt, it was Ros who created the new translation that hundreds of thousands of people have read. Ros, thank you for joining us. 

Ros: Well, thank you very much for inviting me. It's a real, real pleasure. 

Elah: So I wanted to say first, it's pretty unusual to have the chance to translate the same book two times.

You translated this book first in '97 and then again in '22. Tell me how that happened. 

Ros: So what happened, and this is, I mean, this is just the most amazing serendipitous story really. So the original publisher, Harvill, was taken over by Vintage, which is part of Penguin Random House. And the book was sort of languishing on a, on a shelf gathering dust, and one of the sales guys wanted something to read for the weekend, picks up this book, said it had an intriguing title.

At that point it was called The Mistress of Silence, which was what the publishers had chosen to call it. He picked it up, took it home, read it over the weekend, came back into the office on Monday and said to the publishing director, "You've gotta have a look at this. I think you should republish it." So Vintage then got in touch with me, the director, and he said, "We're going to be republishing this book."

And I thought, "Well, that, that's weird. Why would you do that? It didn't go anywhere." And so I said, "Well, if you're republishing it, I'd like to have another look, please, because it's a long time ago and I'd like to have a look at the translation." So he said, "Yeah, fine." And I had a look at the translation and, uh, realized that it needed to be completely redone.

Elah: Why, why was that? 

Ros: I mean, I learned to translate on the job. I don't have any training as a translator. And at the time, I didn't really know what I was doing. I was translating the words, but I wasn't translating the voice. 

Elah: Can you give me an example of something you would have done differently, or you did do differently?

Ros: So first of all, this is a voice of somebody who's not very well-educated who is narrating, and one of the differences between French and English is that French comes from Latin, so French words can sound very intellectual because they're sort of based on the Latin root. English has a whole other register, which is words that come from the Anglo-Saxon root, and those are the words we use in our everyday language.

So when you've got somebody who is narrating in the voice that's talking to the reader, they would use a much more everyday kind of register, especially somebody from that background who's not been educated. And I had gone with the French vocabulary, which––it suggests words to you that are very Latinate––which was completely wrong for that character.

It's not the right voice for somebody in that situation. One of the things I hadn't done, for example, was I hadn't used any contractions, like didn't, couldn't, shouldn't. I wrote did not, could not, should not. And I think that's partly because I'd been living in France for about, well, for eight years, and I'd recently come back to the UK, and language had become much less formal in the time I'd been away.

And I think my language was still very much sort of, "Oh, well, you can't write contractions in a book." It was a sort of a hangover from my own education. And so I did a lot of looking at words that were kind of very Latinate- and changing them to much more simple everyday Anglo-Saxon words. So I'll give you an example.

When she's talking about the watchtowers, in the French she uses a word that translates as they were laid out in a quincunx. A quincunx, it's a landscaping term. 

Elah: Oh. 

Ros: So, yeah, well it comes from the word fi- meaning five. So you've got- Yeah ... sort of a one, two, three, four, one in the middle, five. In the French it's quincunx, and in, in English we have the word 

Elah: quincunx.

Mm-hmm. 

Ros: Originally I'd used a quincunx, but I thought, "No," you know, I didn't know what that meant. Nobody's gonna know what it means. So I changed it to “the bunkers were arranged in groups of five.”

Elah: That definitely helped me as a reader. Thank you. 

Ros: So that's, that's the sort of thing I did. I literally went through it and, and weeded out all those kind of ponderous Latin terms.

Elah: So, I never had the chance to get to know Jacqueline Harpman myself. She died in 2012. But I was reading a bit about her and reading her biography, and the impression I got was of a very strong-willed woman who is determined to thrive, and yeah, determined to seize power where she can. 

Ros: Mm-hmm. 

Elah: But you, you actually had interactions with her.

Not extensive ones, but you did in the course of initially translating this book. Did––do you have any impression of, like, what kind of person she was? 

Ros: Yeah, I did actually meet her, and she was very much a sort of grande dame in, in Belgium. She was hugely popular. I mean, now there are streets and squares named after her, and she was extremely well-educated and erudite, and had an absolute love of the French language.

And her books are all a kind of celebration of, of language. Harpmann was a very, very complex writer. I've been reading quite a lot more of her books, and what she's particularly interested in is women breaking taboos, rebel women, and her books all are variations on that theme, and some of them quite radical.

Elah: Interesting. So okay, so in, in Belgium, obviously not a lost woman at all. She was very well-known, is very well-known there still. And then the book was translated, of course. '97 the translation comes out, and it doesn't find an audience in the English-speaking world. What did you make of that? What did, what do you think happened there?

Ros: Well, I think what happened was it was a small, very niche literary publisher, and they didn't really market their books. I think they were quite complacent in that they had their audience. They were known for doing literary fiction, and they just published a book. Nowadays, publishers invest hugely in marketing and publicity.

They didn't do anything. So when you're bringing a new author, or new in that she hadn't been translated before, if people don't know she exists, they're not gonna buy the book So nothing happened with it. You know, as a translator, you're quite removed from all that. I didn't know how many copies had been sold, or had been sold or hadn't been sold until I got my royalty statement at the end of the year and thought, "Oh, it sold 10 copies."

Um, but by then I was onto the next thing, and it was early days in my career. I didn't have any expectations. I'd done the book. I'd been paid. It was out of my hands. 

Elah: What do you make of this, this current revival? Why is it resonating so widely with young women in particular? I 

Ros: have no idea. I mean, I've, I've, I've sat in on some book group discussions.

I've talked to young women. I've looked at their comments on, on, you know, online. I mean, things like, you know, "This book changed my life," and, "This is the most amazing book I've ever read." I mean, it clearly speaks to, uh ... And not just young women. It speaks to older women. It speaks to men. And the latest is Slavoj Zizek, the philosopher, has put it in his top five books. It seems to appeal to all sorts of people. I guess we're living in very uncertain times, so might echo certain anxieties people have about, well, you know, is there some massive disaster about to happen, some sort of global- catastrophe and how would I survive and how would I cope and, you know, what might happen.

I don't know. I- I honestly don't know. 

Elah: There's something about seeing someone make the most of their situation and- Mm ... even when everything is taken away, finding joy, connection, purpose. 

Ros: Yeah. Yeah. And, and also I think what, what's very touching is the fact they hold on to, to rituals, like when somebody dies, they give them a proper burial.

They, they sing. You know, the, the, the sense of ritual holding people together. And also how a community of women who have nothing in common with each other, who don't even necessarily like each other, but they're thrust together in this situation, and yet they, they find a way of making it work and supporting each other.

So I think that's what I found very uplifting, and probably what a lot of women relate to. 

Elah: I was having a very bad few weeks when I read this, and Jacqueline Harpman, she really goes... She describes these very ingenious examples of how to seize power, like creating their own sense of time and trying to preserve their own memories and traditions… and it definitely caused me to reflect on, you know, that maybe my circumstances were salvageable.

Ros: Well, I think probably that's the message that a lot of people get. It's like, you know, there are things that you can't control that happen, but what you can control is how you react to them and how you know, so I g- I guess that's the underlying message there, that, you know, they, the women couldn't control the fact that they were in this place, but they could control how they dealt with it.

Elah: Yeah. 

Ros: And I guess that, that's the takeaway that makes, you know, people feel uplifted. 

Elah: I think that's a great place to end. Ros Schwartz, thank you for joining us today. 

Ros: Thank you very much for inviting me, and it's been a real pleasure talking to you. 

Elah: Ros Schwartz is an award-winning literary translator of French to English texts.

After the break, we'll be joined by Susan Watkins, a professor of women's writing, to help us understand the psychology of the novel and what Harpman might have been trying to do with this book. We'll be right back

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Welcome back to Lost Women of Science Conversations. Before the break, we were talking about the incredible resurgence of Jacqueline Harpman's 1995 novel, I Who Have Never Known Men. So there's been speculation that this is a moment for feminist dystopias, that young women in particular are just looking for ways to make sense of a time when they feel that their rights and freedoms are being threatened.

I think a big part of the appeal is the title of this book. It’s provocative. You want to know, who is this woman who has never known men? Why has she never known men? And what is this life devoid of men like? Though in the actual book, this felt like a lesser theme to me. It was more about coping with deprivation in general, the absence of very many things.

But for me, what really hit was what the girl at the center of this story does. Maybe she’s not Katniss Everdeen taking down an evil empire. I think what she does is better. This girl finds power over and over in circumstances where you’d think she has absolutely none. 

So in part two of this episode, I’m joined by Susan Watkins. She’s professor of women’s writing at Leeds Beckett University, and specializes in gender, dystopia and post-apocalyptic fiction.  And together we are going to drill deeper on the appeal of this book and… what Harpman was trying to tell us.

Susan: Oh, thanks for having me. 

Elah: So to start, we have here a story about 39 women and one girl who are imprisoned in a cage.

They don't know why they're being held. They don't know how they got there. They don't even know what time it is. In most science fiction that I have read, the basic premise is very carefully explained. Um, but in this book, it's, it's a complete mystery. So, like, how unusual is that? 

Susan: I think it's really unusual, yes.

I mean, I think part of the pleasures of dystopia and speculative fiction are that sort of world building and the info dump, sometimes, of how this happened. What we get in I Who Have Never Known Men, I think, is a much more existentialist sense of permanent crisis and also the boredom of that, and just the micro relationships between the few individuals that there are.

And that's basically all you've got. You don't have any context. You don't have any explanation, and it really boils down to a sense of embodiment for the, um, narrator and what she can build from that, what, what story she can tell, and how she gradually learns to tell time, and how she learns to experience desire, and how she learns to narrate and tell a story.

And that's, I suppose, the sort of fundamental building blocks of being human at a much more general level than the very specific settings we get in some other dystopias. 

Elah: Why, why do you think Harpman has done this to us? Like, what is, what is she trying to do here? 

Susan: I think she's interested in what happens if we strip everything away.

You know, if we strip away all that context and we strip away all the possibilities that normally stop us from thinking about what makes us human, then what's left? As a psychoanalyst, I sort of wonder, I speculate whether it might be that working in that area, she is interested in those fundamentals of desire and language and how those operate to make us human, even in the most stripped down context, even when we don't have family and we don't have society, or we have it in very rudimentary ways.

Elah: I found this, well, it's a paraphrasing of a quote that she gave in 2007 in an interview, but it was something like, and again, not a direct quote, but that she feels no sympathy for women who do not fight to escape their circumstances, and no indulgence for those who let themselves be consumed by misfortune.

Susan: Wow. 

Elah: Harsh. Harsh. Yeah. Apparently she- Yeah ... she did make exceptions for extreme situations like famine and war, but I felt like that gave me some insight into this book. 

Susan: Mm. Mm. 

Elah: That it was someone who's had everything taken away, what can they still do? What are they able to do- Right ... with those circumstances?

Susan: Yeah. Yeah, and I suppose it's about very small discoveries, and very small sort of wins, if you like. You know, so she can decide to, uh, not tell the other women something. 

Elah: Hmm. 

Susan: And that gives her a sort of power, whereas before that, they were the ones who wouldn't tell her something about what life was like before, what, you know, what sex was like, what periods were like.

And so when she realizes that they're interested in what she's doing, she can sort of say, "No, I'm not gonna tell you what I'm thinking," and that gives her some power. So it's these very, very small scale resistances instead of these elaborately constructed forms of resistance that, that involve more than one person, and, and, and a much more elaborate system of, um, challenge to those in power.

Elah: In an interview with The Guardian, you mentioned the concept of cognitive estrangement, which I found interesting. What is that, and how is it used in this book? 

Susan: So cognitive estrangement is a key term for speculative fiction. It's, um, from the critic Darko Suvin, and it's about using any sort of change to create a new world which is unfamiliar to the reader, but yet at the same time it allows comment on the world in which the text was written.

In I Who Have Never Known Men, the novum is let's place 40 women in a cage, and we don't know why they're there. We don't know anything about the environment that they're living in, and then we see what happens. And I guess that allows us to think about things like how we exist in our world, and what happens if that's taken away.

What happens if we're stripped of all those things that make our world make sense? 

Elah: Right. What are the essentials of our lives? 

Susan: I suppose it tells us how much we rely on other people, on those sort of contextual and social markers to make sense of the world around us. Um, and yet it also tells us that we, we can rely on language, we can rely on desire, we can rely on human embodiment, and the capacity to tell stories, to actually make sense of the world around us if those things are stripped away.

Elah: I find it strange that this book is resonating at this time personally. It's, it's just, it's totally blown up. Uh, everyone is talking about it on BookTok, which for people who don't know, is a part of TikTok where people talk about books. I would think in dark, bleak times where women are concerned about their reproductive rights, they wouldn't want this kind of book.

I mean, do, is that generally true? What, do people look to these kinds of books in difficult times, books that, that in some sort of fun house mirror way reflect their difficulties? 

Susan: Yeah, I do think that's true, and I think with lots of other dystopian novels, you know, they are looking to identify with the person who resists the regime, and as we've said, that sort of happens in a smallish way in this novel.

So, so maybe that's partly what they're looking for. But I also think that all literature is about offering you imaginative ways of dealing with what you're experiencing really, and that's why it's popular, because it, uh, it plays out scenarios and alternatives and, and as women in particular, if we are seeing our reproductive freedoms under threat, then, you know, it's understandable.

But I think there would be a certain freshness and interest in reading something like this, even if it is quite bleak. 

Elah: Right. It helps you understand what you're going through. 

Susan: Helps you process. 

Elah: process. Yes. For sure. 

Susan: Yeah. 

Elah: I wanted to actually come back to something, what you were saying earlier when we were discussing the, um, you know, what is she trying to show us by taking everything away from people and seeing how they respond.

And I think one thing I got from it is the importance of, of the little wins and of, of having something to look forward to. 

Susan: Mm. 

Elah: And it's all relative to your current existence. So yes, so when she figures out that she can keep a secret from- Yeah ... other people, even though for us this would not be a revelatory experience, for her it is a complete thrill 

Susan: I wonder if that's also about narrative because you need a story that you don't know the ending to.

And I think what she tells herself is a series of stories. Um, and actually, it- I suppose it's only when you get to the end that you realize that the whole narrative is circular in the way it's been structured. The other thing you said before about keeping the secret, I suppose I can almost again see the psychoanalyst there.

'Cause if you think about children, when they first realize that they can tell lies or that they can, that they are separate from their, you know, adult carers, and that they can actually keep something from their, you know, primary caregivers. I, I sort of feel like that's a fundamental stage in child development.

And so the fact that that is something that happens to the girl, obviously at quite a late age, given, but that's because of the context she's in. I think that's also quite an interesting aspect of the book, actually. 

Elah: You know, looking at, at this book that was largely ignored by the English-speaking world 30 years ago, now has been rediscovered and has gone viral, is this part of a trend?

Is this, can we, uh, can we look forward to more lost women writers being rediscovered and cherished? Is that what's happening here? 

Susan: Yeah. I mean, I absolutely think it's part of a trend. In the 20th century, just to start with, I mean, there are writers like Jean Rhys, who wrote Wide Sargasso Sea, who wrote lots of novels much earlier in the 20th century, and then was dropped by her publisher, became a recluse, almost became, you know, destitute, and was then rediscovered by Diana Athill, a woman publisher, one of the sort of pioneering women publishers.

And, um, I don't know if you know her novel, um, Wide Sargasso Sea, but it's a rewriting of Jane Eyre from the point of view of the mad woman in the attic. Um- Ah ... it's absolutely wonderful, and it made her name again after decades of neglect. And, you know, I do think it's a pattern. I think that women writers are often just rediscovered, neglected, ignored.

Often their work's dismissed because it's considered to be confessional or autobiographical and not therefore clever because they're just writing from life. They're not imaginative. Dismissing by saying, "Actually, their stuff was written by a man." That happened to Mary Shelley. People said, "Oh yeah, Frankenstein must have been really written by Percy Shelley." 

You know, it's, you need to read Joanna Russ' How to Suppress Women's Writing. Okay. Which basically gives you a list of the ways in which women's work is dismissed. 

Elah: But you see that changing now? 

Susan: I do see it changing, and I see it changing through things like TikTok and social media.

So, you know, TikTok picks up books that people don't sort of necessarily think are great, you know, that are not canonical, that are not taught in universities, and it makes them hugely successful. And actually, despite everything we, we might want to say about, um, social media and so on, to some extent I think that people can make a success of a book like this, which is entirely down to a sort of word of mouth except word of mouth on TikTok.

Elah: Well, I certainly hope that we discover more books like this by women who, who were- Mm ... dismissed. Professor Susan Watkins, thank you so much for joining us. 

Susan: Thank you for having me. 

Elah: Susan Watkins is a professor of women's writing at Leeds Beckett University 

This episode of Lost Women of Science was produced by Gabriela Saldivia. Ariel Plotnick edited the episode. Our senior managing producer is Natalia Sánchez Loayza. Sean Carter was our sound designer and engineer. Lizzy Younan composed all of our music. Our intern was Issa Block Kwong. Thanks to Eowyn Burtner, our program manager; Lily Whear, our director of growth and development; Amy Sharf and Katie Hafner, who are our co-executive producers.

Lost Women of Science is funded in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Anne Wojcicki Foundation, and many generous individual donors. We're distributed by PRX. For show notes and an episode transcript, head to lostwomenofscience.org, where you can also support our work by hitting the donate button.

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I'm Elah Feder. Thanks for listening.