Aline-Ali

Aline-Ali is a feminist novel by André Léo, one of the most prolific French women writers of the nineteenth century. The novel’s main character, Aline, rejects the social conventions of her time by breaking off her engagement and taking on the identity of a man. She is thus able to access both the public sphere and the milieu of homosociability from which women were generally excluded. A queer novel before its time, Aline-Ali challenges the construction of gender identity within nineteenth-century French society.