Some scholars, most prominently Joan DeJean, have argued that the modern novel was created by the self-empowerment of French women writers of the 17th century. A particular characteristic of these novels – such as Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s – is that, regardless of (male) poetic regulations, they openly create fictional, even allegorical worlds in which the characters are equally openly factual persons behind fictional masks.

Conversely, the various 19th century concepts of realism – realism, naturalism, the psychological novel, not only in France but also in their European counterparts – create worlds that correspond as closely as possible to the empirical, but in which openly fictional characters operate, that, however, develop such a force that they seem to materialize – in accordance with the maxim “Life imitates Art”, as Oscar Wilde wrote.

Against the backdrop of the female “Tender Rhetorics” as stimulants against the fear of fiction, my contribution comparatively analyses the scientific rhetoric justifying the - vastly predominantly male - realist and naturalist fiction of Balzac, Zola, but also Bourget and Barrès and their various European counterparts like Wilhelm Bölsche.

If this scientific rhetoric is generally interpreted as an attempt to appropriate factual text models and textual generators that justify the mimetic access to the world, it is interpreted here as a reassuring antidote to 19th century currents of thought critical of fiction, which thus gain contour ex negativo.

As early as Genji Monigatari, a novel by Murasaki Shikibu, written around the year 1000 in Japan, the hero forbids his daughter access to novels, because she might believe that the love stories in them exist in reality. He also criticises the female readers, who are absorbed in their reading, for not paying attention to their hairstyles.

Lack of awareness of fictionality, which is detrimental to the conduct of life, especially in the realm of love, indifference to appearance caused by fictional absorption, which disrupts amorous and social exchanges: these grievances, which are surprisingly stable and transcultural, are open to a number of variations and numerous developments. We need to distinguish between several themes, even if they often combine: love training, inadequacy to reality (fictional immersion being understood as a cognitive deficit) and disruption of social and family relationships. One of the hypotheses of this contribution is the deflation of the passion drive argument in favour of the other two grievances (the woman who reads novels is maladjusted to reality and fails in her duties as mother, wife and woman of the world).

Although the paradigm of conduct and brains disturbed by the reading of novels was initially male (Saint Augustine, Don Quixote), from the mid-eighteenth century onwards (notably with Sophie Lennox's The Female Quixote ), the dangers induced by fiction seemed to be aimed more specifically at women, at the very time when they were gaining wider access to writing and reading. This paper will focus on a few nineteenth-century texts. The arguments against fiction, for those who read or wrote it, will find their climax in the theme of the “bas-bleus” (blue stockings). Moreover, surprisingly enough, women authors often developed this theme themselves: Delphine de Girardin, for example, took up the argument of the reader's inadequacy to the world in an exacerbated form. Nor were these themes developed in particularly conservative circles: a Saint-Simonian socialist, Pierre Leroux, who defended women's access to all knowledge (including law and astronomy), insisted on the danger of fiction, which he felt was due to the physiological characteristics of female brains. Since much has already been written about bovarianism, we will confine ourselves to a few comments on Flaubert's work (placed in perspective with this long tradition) and references to existing works.

Set during the tumultuous 1970s Troubles, Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman (2018) narrates the traumatic growth of eighteen-year-old “middle sister” in a closed, totalitarian Catholic community under nationalist paramilitaries’ rule. While critics have studied the female protagonist’s political resistance through her habits such as ambiguous naming, silence, and rumination, few of them notice the equally important power embedded in her weird reading-while-walking. Accused of being not “public-spirited”, her behavior constantly confronts critiques and interventions from everyone, irrespective of the family, communal people, dominant paramilitaries, or police forces the recognized enemy. This article believes that beyond a simple hostility to that uncommon behavior, the textual world actually exhibits a deep suspicion to the object of her reading: “ancient books” of literature written before the twentieth century. Drawing on political and gender theories, it offers a three-layer interpretation of the omnipresent distrust of fictional works during the conflict and examines as well middle sister’s limited but simultaneously transcendental agency in reading them.