Jacqueline Harpman

Jacqueline Harpman
Born	5 July 1929 Etterbeek, Brussels, Belgium
Died	24 May 2012(2012-05-24) (aged 82) Uccle, Belgium
Nationality	Belgian
Occupation(s)	Writer, Psychoanalyst
Notable work	Brève Arcadie (1959) La plage d'Ostende (1991) Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes (1995) Orlanda (1996) La Dormition des amants (2002)
Spouses	Émile Degelin (1953–1962) Pierre Puttemans (1963-2012)
Awards	Prix Victor-Rossel (1959) Prix Point de mire (1992) Prix Médicis (1996) Prix triennal du roman de la Communauté française de Belgique (2003)

Jacqueline Harpman (5 July 1929 – 24 May 2012) was a Belgian Francophone writer and psychoanalyst.

Biography

Jacqueline Harpman was born on 5 July 1929, in Etterbeek, Belgium, to Jeanne Honorez and Andries Harpman. The couple exported Belgian fabrics and lace to North African colonies, and only settled in an apartment after Jacqueline's birth. She was the second daughter born to the couple after her sister Andrée, nine years her senior. Her father being a Dutch-born Jew, Harpman's family fled to Casablanca, Morocco when the Nazis invaded during World War II and they did not return to Belgium until the war had ended in 1945. A large part of her paternal family was killed at Auschwitz. Jacqueline continued her secondary studies at the Mets Sultan College in Casablanca because she was forbidden from attending the French High School due to her Jewish origins. She would also have the misfortune of having to listen to Jacques Doriot's hatred of the Jews. It was in fact by remembering her feelings that day that she wrote En quarantaine. In this college, she met Mademoiselle Barthes who had been her French teacher and to whom she owed her love for the pure language of the 18th and 19th centuries. Back in Brussels in 1945, she finished her secondary studies at the Lycée de Forest, then she began studying medicine at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). In 1948, she contracted tuberculosis and was admitted to the university sanatorium of Eupen, where she began writing an unpublished novel, Les Jeux Dangeureux. She was bed-ridden for two years in the sanatorium, before Penicillin allowed her to resume her medical studies, which she continued without completing. In 1953, she married for the first time to the Flemish filmmaker Émile Degelin with whom she collaborated on the writing and directing of several films. They would divorce in 1962.

She published her first text L'amour et l'acacia and her first novel L'apparition des esprits with editor René Julliard. In 1959, she received the Victor-Rossel prize for her novel Brève Arcadie. She wrote for the cinema, made radio broadcasts and wrote theatre reviews. In 1963, she remarried to the architect and poet Pierre Puttemans and in August, on the 19th, she gave birth to her first daughter, Marianne.

In 1965, she wrote her third novel Les bons sauvages and gave birth to her second daughter, Toinon, on May 18th. After the death of René Julliard in 1962 and driven by a desire for change, she "put down her pen in the middle of writing her fourth novel" as she liked to say and went to enroll at the ULB where she undertook psychology studies and graduated with a dissertation on the blind prognosis of Rorschach tests. She worked for several years as a psychotherapist at the Fond'Roy clinic, which she left, angry at the treatment methods that the institution practiced at that time. She then began to practice privately. She became interested in psychoanalysis and began training at the Belgian Psychoanalytic Society (1976). She worked with Jean Bégoin, a Parisian Kleinian psychoanalyst. Starting in 1980, she wrote articles for the Belgian Psychoanalytic Review. Some of her best articles were collected by her husband in the publication Écriture et Psychanalyse (Mardaga 2011), including an article on Vampires, another on Proust, and many articles on feminism.

While training to become a psychoanalyst, she resumed writing and published in 1987 the novel La Mémoire trouble, then in 1990, La fille démantelée and in 1991, La plage d’Ostende, which received the Point de Mire prize in 1992. Then, she published La lucarne, a collection of short stories in which she revisits in particular the myths of Mary, Antigone and Joan of Arc, and le Bonheur dans le crime. This novel takes place in an existing Brussels house: the Delune house (Feys castle) at the intersection of the avenues des Phalènes and Roosevelt. The imaginary plan of the novel was created with the collaboration of her architect husband Pierre Puttemans. She also continues to play with architecture by featuring an architect in En toute impunité in which three generations of women try by all means to preserve the ruined castle that they have always owned. The architect who bears witness to the story of these women is called Jean Avijl, literary pseudonym of Pierre Puttemans.

In 1995, she published Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes (I Who Have Never Known Men), which would become her first novel to be translated to English, originally published under the title The Mistress of Silence, then Orlanda in 1996 (Prix Médicis, 2006) and L’Orage rompu in 1997. For Le Passage des Éphémères (2004), she asked Pierre Cugnon, an astrophysicist attached to the Royal Observatory of Uccle to guide her in the Observatory to ground her story in reality. He also answered her questions for the novel Le Temps est un Rêve (2004). She did not hide her love of physics and envied the character from Temps est un rêve who is given the chance to live a second life and study physics and astrophysics. She had a gigantic library where theoretical physics books, scientific journals and science fiction novels were mixed.

Several filmmakers were interested in her work and Gérard Corbiau also approached her. He went so far as to propose a fairly complete screenplay that emphasized the flashback in her story.

Jacqueline Harpman continued to write and practice her psychoanalyst activities until her death on May 24th, 2012 from cancer. She died peacefully at home surrounded by her husband, daughters and grandchildren.

Her two daughters and four grandchildren each contribute in their own way to keeping parts of her alive. Her daughter Marianne is a professor of History of Architecture at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, her daughter Toinon is a professor of Mathematics at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts (ARBA), her grandchildren too have made her proud: one is an art restorer and could have restored the works of Leopold Wiesbek from La plage d'Ostende, the second is an agronomist and takes up the torch of the women of science present throughout her novels, the third is a musician and the fourth a mathematician working in connection with theoretical physics.

Her daughters have, according to her wish, deposited all of her archives at the Archives et Musée de la Littérature in Brussels where the archivists will reconstruct her writing desk.

In 2014 and 2015, Emilie Guillaume, a young actress from Brussels, brought Joan of Arc to life in a show called Jeanne d'Arc au Troisième Degré (Joan of Arc in the Third Degree), which combined Jacqueline Harpman's text with an remarkable performance of theatre, circus and martial arts. Jeannine Pâque, Jacqueline Harpman's biographer, is certain that she would have loved to see her text vibrate in this way.

Since the 2010s, her novels have been translated several times. Since 2020 in particular, Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes (I Who Have Never Known Men) has enjoyed renewed success and as of February 2025, there have been 23 translations of this novel into German, English from the United Kingdom, English from the United States, Arabic, Korean, Catalan, Castilian, Finnish, Georgian, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese from Brazil, Portuguese from Portugal, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swedish, Czech and Turkish. Described as a "gen Z Handmaid's Tale", the novel gained significant traction in early 2025 on BookTok, TikTok's book reader community, after being republished in 2022. It gathered over 178,000 ratings on GoodReads and sold over 100,000 copies in 2024 in the United States alone.

Honors and Awards

• 1959 : prix Victor-Rossel for Brève Arcadie,
• 1992 : prix Point de Mire (RTBF) for La Plage d'Ostende,
• 1996 : prix Médicis pour Orlanda
• 2003 : Prix triennal du roman de la Communauté française de Belgique pour La Dormition des amants
• 2019 : an avenue of Uccle was named after her to honor her life's work · .
• 2020 : a new street, next to the town hall of Etterbeek, is named Jacqueline Harpman.
• 2022 : the new municipal library of Molenbeek-Saint-Jean is named after her · .
• 2024 : on the 5th of July 2024, the Google Doodle is dedicated to her to celebrate her birthday.

List of Works

• L'Amour et l'Acacia coll. Nouvelles, 1958)
• Brève Arcadie (Julliard, 1959) prix Victor-Rossel [1]
• L'Apparition des esprits (Julliard, 1960)
• Les Bons Sauvages (Julliard, 1966 et Labor, coll. Espace Nord, No. 79)
• La Mémoire trouble (Gallimard, 1987)
• La Fille démantelée (Stock, 1990)
• La Plage d'Ostende (Stock, 1991 et Livre de Poche No. 9587)
• La Lucarne (Stock, 1992)
• Le Bonheur dans le crime (Stock, 1993)
• Moi qui n'ai pas connu les hommes (I Who Have Never Known Men) (Stock, 1995 et Livre de Poche No. 14093)
• Orlanda (Grasset, 1996 et Livre de Poche No. 14468) (prix Médicis)
• L'Orage rompu (Grasset, 1998)
• Dieu et moi (Mille et une nuits, 1999)
• Récit de la dernière année (Grasset, 2000)
• Le Véritable Amour (Ancrage, 2000)
• La Vieille Dame et moi (Le Grand Miroir, 2001)
• En quarantaine (Mille et une nuits, 2001)
• Ève et autres nouvelles (Espace nord, 2001)
• La Dormition des amants (Grasset, 2002) (prix du roman CF de Belgique)
• Le Placard à balais (Le grand miroir, 2003)
• Jusqu'au dernier jour de mes jours (Labor, 2004)
• Le Temps est un rêve (Le Grand Miroir, 2004)
• Le Passage des éphémères (Grasset, 2004)
• La Forêt d'Ardenne (Le grand miroir, 2004)
• En toute impunité (Grasset, 2005)
• Du côté d'Ostende (Grasset, 2006) ("grand prix SGDL de littérature" 2006, for the entirety of the work)
• Mes Œdipe (Grand Miroir, 2006)
• Ce que Dominique n'a pas su (Grasset, 2007)
• Écriture et Psychanalyse (Mardaga 2011)