- Born
- Died
- Suzanne Lilar was born on May 21, 1901 in Ghent, Belgium. She was a writer, known for Benvenuta (1983) and Teatro de siempre (1966). She died on November 11, 1992 in Brussels, Belgium.
- In 1956 Lilar succeeds Gustave Van Zype as member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature.
- Lilar began her literary career as a journalist, reporting on Republican Spain for the newspaper L'Indépendance belge in 1931. She later became a playwright with Le Burlador (1946), an original reinterpretation of the myth of Don Juan from the female perspective that revealed a profound capacity for psychological analysis. She wrote two more plays, Tous les chemins mènent au ciel (1947), a theological drama set in a 14th-century convent, and Le Roi lépreux (1951), a neo-Pirandellian play about the Crusades.
- The novel 'La Confession anonyme' ("The Anonymous Confession"), an intense examination of a tortured relationship between a young Belgian woman and her Italian lover was filmed by the Belgian director André Delvaux as Benvenuta in 1983.
- Her oeuvre has been translated in numerous languages.
- In writings on Rubens, the Androgyne or homosexuality in Ancient Greece, Lilar meditates on the role of the woman in conjugal love throughout the ages. Translated into Dutch in 1976, it includes an afterword by Marnix Gijsen. In the same vein she later wrote critical essays on Jean-Paul Sartre (À propos de Sartre et de l'amour, 1967) and Simone de Beauvoir (Le Malentendu du Deuxième Sexe, 1969).
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