Gabrielle Réval

Gabrielle Réval (also G. Réval) was the pen name of Gabrielle Élise Victoire Logerot (20 December 1869 – 15 October 1938), a French novelist and essayist.

Biography

Gabrielle Réval was born as Gabrielle Élise Victoire Logerot on 20 December 1869, in Viterbo. She was a student at the École normale supérieure de jeunes filles (ENSJF) in Sèvres, receiving her teaching diploma in 1890.

After successfully passing the agrégation in 1893, she taught at the girls' high school in Niort.

Choosing the pen name "Réval", in several of her novels, she wrote about girls in their schools and their place in society, for example, Lycéennes (1902) and La Bachelière (1910). She was noticed from her first book, Les Sévriennes (1900), in which she describes her experiences in Sèvres.

In 1904, when the issue of girls' primary and secondary education was gaining attention, she published L’Avenir de nos filles, a work listing women's professions. She underscored the precariousness for women to become authors: "Only a rich woman can, to some extent, reconcile her duties as a mother with those as a writer".

In November that year, she co-founded "le prix Vie heureuse" (Happy Life award), which later became the Prix Femina. With 21 other women who contributed to the journal La Vie heureuse, she sought to develop an alternative to the Prix Goncourt, considered misogynistic.

From its inception until her death, she was an active member of the "Club des Belles Perdrix", the first French women writers' gastronomic club, which she co-founded at the restaurant Chez les Vikings, on 18 January 1928, together with some 20 others.