The Choice of Life

Published in 1904, this quasi-autobiographical novel by the French soprano and author Georgette Leblanc follows an educated, independent woman who lives alone in the country and feels a restless urge to rescue other women from lives she sees as wasted. In the village of Sainte-Colombe she fixes on Rose, a poor and downtrodden farm girl, and sets out to lift her from servitude through friendship, learning, and self-discovery. As the two grow close, a deep and complicated attachment forms between them, and the narrator confronts how far one person can really reshape another’s fate. Translated into English by Alexander Teixeira de Mattos in 1914, it reads less like a plotted romance than a study of female freedom and self-determination in Belle Époque France.