Marie Lenéru
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Marie Lenéru | |
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 Marie Lenéru at age 37. | |
| Born | June 2, 1875 |
| Died | September 23, 1918 (aged 43) Lorient, France |
| Resting place | Cimetière Saint-Martin de Brest |
| Other names | Antoine Morsain (pseudonym) |
| Occupations | playwright, diarist |
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Marie Lenéru (June 2, 1875 – September 23, 1918) was a French playwright and diarist.
Lenéru became deaf and partially blind after contracting measles as a child. She was able to continue her education with the help of her mother, and in the 1910s she wrote several plays that were performed in Paris, notably Les Affranchis.
Marie Lenéru was born in 1875 in Brest, France. Her family lived on rue de Siam. Her father Alfred Lenéru (1843–1876) was a naval lieutenant, a knight of the Legion of Honour, and a 1863 graduate of the École navale. He died when Marie was only 10 months old. The son of Parisian hoteliers, Alfred had married Marie Dauriac, the daughter of Rear Adm. Alexandre Dauriac and Augustine Hollard, in Brest in 1872. Other naval officers in Marie Lenéru's family included her great-grandfather Capt. Alexandre Dauriac and her uncles Commissioner General of the Navy Charles Dauriac and Capt. François Dauriac. She had one brother, Lionel Dauriac (1847–1923), who attended the École normale supérieure and became a philosophy professor and knight in the Legion of Honour.[1]
In May 1887, after having measles, Marie Lenéru became deaf and blind. She was 11 years old. Her mother worked to continue her education, using only her sense of touch.[2]
She eventually regained some of her eyesight, enabling her to write and read under a magnifying glass, but her deafness persisted. She died in 1918 in Lorient, during the Spanish flu pandemic.
Lenéru is perhaps best known as the subject of research by Suzanne Lavaud, the first deaf person to obtain a doctor of letters degree in France.[3]
