The increase in the visibility of autobiographies and fiction recounting suffering in this century has gone hand-in-hand with a notable emphasis on the possibilities and limits of empathy. Contemporary French women's writing inscribes and interrogates the imperative to witness and respond to another subject's pain and raises questions about the relation between empathy and reading. Engaging with a range of recent texts, including work by Marie Darrieussecq, Am lie Nothomb, Camille Laurens, Delphine de Vigan and Christine Angot, and representations of different kinds of suffering (including eating disorders, the death of a child, and sexual abuse), this book engages productively with notions of empathy in relation to gender and alterity as well as with the question of what is at stake in reading narratives of someone else's pain.

Kathryn Robson is Senior Lecturer in French at Newcastle University.