10 Facts About Suzanne Lilar

Baroness Suzanne Lilar was a Flemish Belgian essayist, novelist, and playwright writing in French.

Suzanne Lilar was the wife of the Belgian Minister of Justice Albert Lilar and mother of the writer Francoise Mallet-Joris and the art historian Marie Fredericq-Lilar.

Suzanne Lilar was a member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature from 1952 to 1992.

In 1919 Suzanne Lilar attended the State University of Ghent, where she studied philosophy and was the first woman to receive a law degree in 1925.

In 1956 Suzanne Lilar succeeds Gustave Van Zype as member of the Royal Academy of French Language and Literature.

Suzanne Lilar began her literary career as a journalist, reporting on Republican Spain for the newspaper L'Independance belge in 1931.

Suzanne Lilar later became a playwright with Le Burlador, an original reinterpretation of the myth of Don Juan from the female perspective that revealed a profound capacity for psychological analysis.

Suzanne Lilar wrote two more plays, Tous les chemins menent au ciel, a theological drama set in a 14th-century convent, and Le Roi lepreux, a neo-Pirandellian play about the Crusades.

Suzanne Lilar followed this with Journal de l'analogiste, in which the origin of the experience of beauty and poetry was guided by a path of analogies.

Suzanne Lilar wrote two autobiographical books, Une Enfance gantoise and A la recherche d'une enfance, and two novels, both of which date from 1960, Le Divertissement portugais and La Confession anonyme, a neoplatonic idealization of love filtered through personal experience.