Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

Following the French Revolution, her father's business was ruined, and she traveled with her mother to Guadeloupe in search of financial help from a distant relative.

Marceline's mother died of yellow fever there, and the young girl somehow made her way back to France.

She later became friends with the novelist Honoré de Balzac, and he once wrote that she was an inspiration for the title character of La Cousine Bette.

[6] The publication of her innovative volume of elegies in 1819 marks her as one of the founders of French Romantic poetry.

She is the only female writer included in the famous Les Poètes maudits anthology published by Paul Verlaine in 1884.