Antoinette Henriette Clémence Robert

Who was Antoinette Henriette Clémence Robert?

Antoinette Henriette Clémence Robert was a French writer of historical fiction, poetry, non-fiction, stage plays, and short stories. From 1855 to 1870, she and Virginie Ancelot were the most popular novelists of the roman populaire genre. She published much of her work as Clémence Robert.

Mlle Robert was born in Mâcon in December 1797. She was a strong student with a penchant for history. Her first published work was Cri de joie d’une Française sur la naissance de SAR Mgr le duc de Bordeaux. Her father was a deputy judge in Mâcon. When he died in 1830, the year of the July Revolution, she moved to Paris for the society of other women writers, and to reunite with her older brother. In her early days in Paris, she worked in a library. In 1845 she retired to the quiet of Abbaye-aux-Bois, a Catholic convent that also let rooms to women of high social standing, but soon returned to her career. Her stay there coincided with a major literary salon hosted by her friends François-René de Chateaubriand and Juliette Récamier, in Mlle Récamier quarters at the abbey. Clémence Robert died in Paris in 1872, five days before her 75th birthday.