When Tom Sosnowski asked me to act as commentator for this session, I was honoured to accept. Susan Conner was not just a friend. Although our research interests were very different, she was a mentor to me. I first met her in the summer of at the Archives Nationales in Paris.
I was a lonely and nervous graduate student when Susan took me under her wing. She introduced me to other people working in Paris, but she also reassured me that I could do archival research. Happily, we kept in touch and, in the years that followed, she gave me valuable advice on completing my dissertation, on conferences, and on making an academic career. The three papers today demonstrate that Susan Conner was an outstanding scholar.
She was also one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever known. Madame Junot was a prolific author whose publications include eighteen volumes of memoirs. Sosnowski points out, however, that Conner used these memoirs critically and only in conjunction with archival evidence.
This is an important observation. Among the regular attendees was Metternich, the Austrian diplomat and statesman who would shape European politics after the Restoration. Disillusioned with Junot as a husband, even before his estrangement from Napoleon in and his death in , she pursued her own life. Conner viewed Madame Junot as a feminist, Sosnowski tells us, because of her efforts to establish her own career as a female writer in a male-dominated world.
She published not only memoirs, but histories, novels, and essays that reflected the themes of Romanticism. Male authority denied women the exercise of power, limited their possibilities, and relegated them to gendered and controlled spaces. Conner argued, as Hooper-Hamersley explains, that prostitution was an economic choice for women.
