Georges de Peyrebrune (1841–1917)

Georges de Peyrebrune was the pen name of Mathilde Marie Georgina Élisabeth de Peyrebrune Judicis, born in the village of Pierrebrune in the Dordogne region of France. Her parents were not married. Her mother was Françoise Thérèse Céline Judicis and her father was a landowner, Georges Johnston. She said she derived her pen name from Georges Sand and her hometown; she also sometimes used her birth surname. In 1860, at age 18, she married Paul Adrien Eimery, but the union was unhappy and they separated. She went to Paris after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871, and made her literary debut in the magazine Revue des deux Mondes. Many of her novels were later serialized in this literary and cultural journal. Peyrebrune became a key French feminist during the Belle Époque and one of France's most popular novelists. She also wrote for several women's magazines, in which she expressed her feminist ideas. She published more than 30 novels in her career, including 14 in the 1880s alone, such as the novella A Decadent Woman (1886). Two of her novels won awards from the Académie française: Vers Amour won the Prix de Jouy in 1897 and Au pied du mât won the Prix Montyon in 1900. She served on the jury for the Prix Fémina literary award at its founding in 1905 and for many years afterwards. She was a friend of the writers Camille Delaville and Rachilde, among others. At the end of her life, she fell into poverty and oblivion and died at age 76.