Jeunes filles en serre chaude (Young girls in a hothouse) is a 1934 novel by the French author Jeanne Galzy. Its protagonists are young women at the École normale supérieure de jeunes fillesinSèvres, a suburb of Paris, at the time a girls-only school. The school, which Galzy herself attended, trained girls especially as teachers for the secondary education system.[1] The background for the events in the novel is the 50th anniversary of the secondary school system for women;[2] it is one of many French novels and other (autobiographical) texts of the period in which authors' school and university experiences were recounted.[3]
Following Burnt Offering (1929) and Les Démons de la solitude (1931), it is the third novel by Galzy (this one with a "seductive title"[4]) to explore lesbian desire.[5][6] The intergenerational love in the novel (between a teacher, Gladys Benz, and a student, Isabelle, told from Isabelle's point of view) is likewise a reflection of Galzy's own experiences.[7] The school was reputed to be a "breeding ground of homosexual relationship", and had earlier been the subject of a novel exploring same-sex desire, Les Sévriennes (1900) by Gabrielle Reval.[8]
Like most of Galzy's novels, Jeunes filles is neglected by modern readers,[2][7] though it did attract some attention at the time of publication. A French reviewer remarked that the novel shows that "overworked brains" sometimes fall prey to "dangerous aberrations".[9] A brief note in The Modern Language Journal remarked that "trivial but intensely human emotional reactions are realistically depicted",[10] and the 1935 New International Year Book warned that the students depicted in the book have a "strong emotional reaction of an undesirable nature".[11] The book is no longer in print; passages from it were anthologized in a 1985 collection of erotic women's literature.[12]
Ce sont les étudiantes de l'École de Sèvres dont les cerveaux surmenés causent parfois des aberrations dangereuses.
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