She has no other recollections and is aware that she will never share the experiences which the other women wax nostalgic about. The unnamed narrator is a teenager who has only known life in the bunker. The older women hazily but fondly recall a different “normality”, one in which they went around the daily business of life – working, falling in love, raising families. Eventually, the women manage to escape, only to find themselves roaming what seems to be an uninhabited, post-apocalyptic alien world. The novel’s premise is simple: in an undefined period in the near future, we meet forty women who are kept prisoners in a cage in an underground bunker, guarded by a group of armed men, and supplied with just the basic necessities of modern life – electricity, food, water and medication.
Mistress of Silence has now been reissued by Vintage Books with the title I Who Have Never Known Men, in the translation by Ros Schwartz, a veteran translator from the French who was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2009. Harpman’s 1995 novel Moi Qui N’ai Pas Connu les Hommes was the first to be translated into English (originally with the title Mistress of Silence) and, although I stand to be corrected, I believe that of her other novels, only the Prix Medicis prize-winner "Orlanda" is also available in English. Perhaps I might be forgiven considering the dearth of English translations of her works. I confess with some shame that I had never heard of her. "I was forced to acknowledge too late, much too late, that I too had loved, that I was capable of suffering, and that I was human after all…"īelgian psychoanalyst and author Jacqueline Harpman (1929-2012) wrote over fifteen novels and won several literary prizes. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman's modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl-the fortieth prisoner-sits alone and outcast in the corner. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before. Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage.
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