Arbitrating the Arbitrary? Taste in Rachilde’s Fin-de-Siècle Book Reviews/Arbitrer l’arbitraire? Le goût selon Rachilde dans ses comptes rendus fin de siècle

During the first decade of her Mercure de France book review column, Rachilde evolved from an avant-garde provocatrice to an established literary figure. While denigrating bourgeois taste and traditional critical authority, Rachilde asserted the critic’s duty to champion literary underdogs and to defend readers from mediocre works. She used the ‘Romans’ column to assert an alternative vision of literary value and to re-position herself in the wake of Decadence and Symbolism.