Volume 17, Number 7 · November 4, 1971
A Modern Instance
By Neal Ascherson
The Affair of Gabrielle Russier
with a Preface by Raymond Jean, an Introduction by Mavis Gallant
Knopf, 177 pp., $5.95
Gabrielle Russier had her hair cut very short. There were private reasons enough for that: to suit her sharp little face, to look more like the boys and girls she taught at the lycée, to define her own severely independent style as a femme divorcée who was an intellectual and—in a Latin land—kept herself. But when one looks back upon her fate, the cropped hair seems like a sort of blind preadaptation. In 1944, at the Liberation, they shaved the hair of girls who had slept with Germans and thrust them into the street to face the jeering crowds.
Review, 1822 words
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