Annie Freud on Louise Labé (c. 1522–1566)

Louise Labé (née Charly) was a celebrated Renaissance French poet born into a prosperous Lyonnais family of rope-makers. As relatively little is known about her life, it seems useful to set her achievement and her reputation in some historical and cultural context. 

As well as being the site of an established rope-making industry, Lyon in the sixteenth century was the second capital of France and a centre of thriving mercantilism, including silk weaving, printing, publishing in a great variety of languages, architecture and town planning. The city at this time saw a great increase in its population, while not expanding outwards. It was a crowded, violent place, with episodes of bloody rioting, and religious and political conflict.

Being at the confluence of two great rivers and trading routes, Lyon attracted many influential German and Italian craftsmen, merchants and bankers. Along with its agriculture and culinary arts, a brew of social and intellectual activity also flourished; it was home to an important poetic movement devoted to the Petrarchan and Neo-Platonist traditions, and which preceded that of the more famous Pléiade. The well-to-do middle classes of Lyon enjoyed a very particular kind of Renaissance.  

The portrait engraving of Louise Labé by Pierre Woeiriot shows her elaborately but soberly coifed and dressed, her gaze direct and half-smiling. Known variously as ‘La Belle Cordière’ and ‘La Belle Amazone’, and having something of the status of a cult figure (even in her lifetime, when she was compared to Sappho), some have felt entitled to invent identities for her: society beauty, lesbian, adulteress, fraud, prostitute, horticulturalist, muse etc. There was even a theory promulgated – and subsequently vociferously contested by a number of distinguished intellectuals – that she, the poet, was a fiction created by a coterie of her (male) peers who wrote ‘her’ poems, which Labé signed as hers.

André Gide, in the wonderful preface to his Anthologie de la Poésie Française (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), grudgingly suggests that her status in the canon rests as much on ‘succès de scandale’ as on her work. But what matters is that he saw fit to include five of her ‘finest’ poems. In an article on Labé published in the Oxford Bibliographies Series, Professor Kirk D. Read writes that her work ‘offers a stunning trove of evidence of a female writer’s negotiation of the literary and social conventions that challenged learned women of this time.’  

Her poems are ravishing in their deceptive simplicity, their mastery of the Petrarchan sonnet form, convincing eroticism, marvellously nuanced emotion, subversion of the tropes of courtly love and their sly comedy. The reader becomes sensible to the remarkable clarity of her voice. Her work does not need any spicy tale or ill-judged calumny – or even martialled defence from the great and good – to engage the modern reader with the greatest immediacy. And yet I have to admit that the mystique around her and her circle (which I believe was, to an extent, her deliberate creation) only adds to her allure.

Five Sonnets after Louise Labé

Annie Freud is a poet, translator, teacher, editor, and painter. Her first collection The Best Man That Ever Was (Picador, 2007) received a Poetry Book Society recommendation and was awarded the Dimplex Prize for New Writing. The Mirabelles (Picador, 2010), was a Poetry Book Society Choice and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her third collection was The Remains (Picador, 2015), which also received an award from the Poetry Book Society. Hiddensee, published in January 2021 by Picador, is her fourth collection.