Albertine Sarrazin was the first female novelist in France for whom prison was the source and substance of successful imaginative production. Her literary output of the 1960s, comparatively small because of her tragically short life, represents a radical departure from the earlier writings of women imprisoned in France: her novels' transformation of prison experience into coherent and self-sustaining fictional accounts breaks with the female tradition of confessional, apparently unshaped texts; and her resolutely affirmative assertion of authorship contrasts sharply with the apologetic stance of her imprisoned forerunners. Through her fiction, Sarrazin energetically criticizes the social conventions by which she was labeled deviant and punished. In this sense, her works reflect the more general trend in women's writing of the time toward angry or ironic rejection of gender, class, and ethnic categories. Yet, in content, Sarrazin's writing is highly conservative, because it embraces as foremost values proud individualism, romantic...