Recommendations
Books Like La Chamade by Françoise Sagan
Books for readers who loved Lucile's kept-woman freedom and Sagan's study of security versus desire
La Chamade (1965) is Sagan's most explicitly economic novel — Lucile kept comfortably by Charles falls in love with Antoine and must choose between a life that is pleasant and a life that is alive. These 8 books share its study of women's economic dependence, its portrait of a kept woman who is not a victim, and its understanding that the choice between security and passion is rarely as simple as romance would have it.
- 1
Buy on AmazonAimez-vous Brahms...
by Françoise Sagan
The most directly comparable Sagan novel — the same triangle, the same question about choosing between an older lover and a younger one, but from the other position: Paule has to choose between Roger (familiar, unfaithful) and Simon (young, devoted), while Lucile is the Simon figure now choosing.
- 2
Buy on AmazonBonjour Tristesse
by Françoise Sagan
The debut — start here if this is your first Sagan; Cécile's world of Riviera summer is the earlier version of the careless privilege that Lucile inhabits with Charles.
- 3
Buy on AmazonThe Age of Innocence
by Edith Wharton
Wharton's New York society imposes on women an explicit choice between freedom and respectability — the same structural choice as Lucile's between Antoine and Charles, in a more rigidly constraining social setting.
- 4
Buy on AmazonA Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams
Blanche DuBois dependent on the kindness of strangers — the theatrical version of the predicament of a woman whose beauty is her only resource, and what happens when that resource fails.
- 5
Buy on AmazonThe House of Mirth
by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart navigating New York society without quite enough money or quite enough willingness to compromise — the American predecessor to Lucile's situation, showing what happens when a woman in Lucile's position loses the protection of a Charles.
- 6
Buy on AmazonBreakfast at Tiffany's
by Truman Capote
Holly Golightly is the American version of the kept woman as a figure of freedom rather than submission — the same milieu and the same question about what a beautiful woman without money actually chooses, handled with more comedy and nostalgia than Sagan brings.
- 7
Buy on AmazonDangerous Liaisons
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
The earlier French novel in which beautiful women navigate a society that gives them beauty as their only resource and punishes them for using it — the eighteenth-century background against which Sagan's twentieth-century versions of the same situation stand.
- 8
Buy on AmazonGone Girl
by Gillian Flynn
Amy Dunne constructing and deconstructing a version of herself — a contemporary thriller version of the question that La Chamade poses: what does a woman do with her own life when she has been defined entirely in relation to a man?
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