Suzanne Lilar

During her studies she attended a seminar on Hadewych. Her interest in the 13th century poet and mystic would play an important role in her later essays, plays and novels. Lilar's historic-cultural insight, her analysis of consciousness and emotion, her search for beauty and love are at the same time current and timeless.

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.

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).

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

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

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.

After having lived her youth in Ghent, and following a brief first marriage, she moved to Antwerp where she became the first woman lawyer, and where in 1929 she married the lawyer Albert Lilar who would later become a Minister of Justice and Minister of State (Liberal Party).

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