Literary representations of ageing and caregiving are playing an increasingly prominent role in the humanities. The disruption to the normal modes and routines of institutionalised care caused by the pandemic has revealed the vulnerabilities at the heart of our care systems. These revelations have fuelled a plethora of recent French and Francophone texts, in which the former privacy of the “home” has come under public scrutiny. In her inaugural lecture, Professor Siobhán McIlvanney looks at different literary representations of ageing and care in recent women’s writing in French. Beginning with Simone de Beauvoir’s early analyses of the care home, Professor McIlvanney examines the role of collaboration between carer and cared for in these texts, texts that are not only written about that relationship of care but at times also by those directly involved in it. In her lecture, she will ask how these literary representations of collaborative care may teach us to age and care better.

The event will be presented by Catherine Boyle, Professor of Latin American Cultural Studies at King's College London. The lecture will include comments from Dr Catherine Schmutz-Brun from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. It will be responded to by Shirley Jordan, Emerita Professor of French Studies at Newcastle University. It will be followed by a reception.

About Professor Siobhán McIlvanney

Siobhán McIlvanney is Professor of French and Francophone Women’s Writing at King’s College London. She has published a monograph on the Nobel Prize winning author Annie Ernaux, Annie Ernaux: The Return to Origins and a study of the origins of women’s journals in France, Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women’s Press, 1759-1848. She has co-edited volumes on women’s writing and film in French, and has a publication forthcoming next year, Women and Power in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures and Societies. She is also co-editor of the De Gruyter series, Cultures of Ageing and Care.