Adelheid Duvanel

Adelheid Duvanel (born Adelheid Feigenwinter: 23 April 1936 – 8 July 1996) was a Swiss writer. Her earlier work appeared under one of two simple pseudonyms, "Judith" or "Judith January".

Life Provenance and troubled childhood Adelheid Feigenwinter, the oldest of her parents' four children, was born in Pratteln. There had been five children, but her brother Stefan died in infancy. Slightly unusually, the religious differences that had been a feature of the region for centuries were reflected in the family home. Georg Feigenwinter was a deeply committed Catholic while Adelheid's mother, born Elisabeth Lichtenhahn, had been born a city girl and grown up as a Protestant. Both her parents could trace their Swiss ancestry back to the renaissance period, but her mother's family had originally come from Leipzig, obtaining Swiss citizenship rights as recently as 1524. The child's own intellectual capacities were unmissable from an early stage: both at junior school and within the family they spoke of her as something of a "Wunderkind". At around the same time she also commenced (but never completed) a course in textiles design.

Writer Adelheid Feigenwinter started writing short stories when she was 7. The drawing and painting came only a few years later. When she was married she broke of the painting. Her husband, also a painter, was an insecure man and, by all accounts, a brutish marriage partner. But the short stories – identified by admirers as "Prosaminiaturen" ("prose miniatures"), continued to flow. Her first published work, entitled "In the Shadow of the Madhouse", appeared when she was 19. A year later, in 1976, the first collected volume of her works appeared. Many of the stories in it had been published in newspapers during the preceding months, especially at that time the Sunday supplement of the Basler Nachrichten. More volumes of "Prosaminiaturen" followed. Critics and scholars were impressed: "Open a page at random, and [wherever you land] Adelheid Duvanel's dense sentences will drive you breathlessly to read on. Expressionistic imagery blends with laconic intimate social realism ..... Precisely targeted whips land right at the beginning in Duvanel's exceptionally thick prose." Or again: "evocative, stripped-down, spare and metaphor-rich and can be savoured line by line, like poetry. Sullen, sardonic, simultaneously wistful and gloomy, [her] prose miniatures are twisted fairy tales featuring pixie depressives nurturing secret griefs". Prizes followed. One of her greatest fans was the professor and literature polymath Peter von Matt, who contributed lengthy elucidatory epilogues for two of her volumes. Adelheid Feigenwinter married the painter Joseph Edward Duvanel in 1962. Throughout their marriage, which lasted till 1981, they lived together in Basel, albeit with one lengthy exception, during 1969/69, when they took an extended trip to the little island of Formentera (directly to the south of Ibiza). By that time the couple's daughter Adelheid had been born, in 1964. By this time she had also, for the first time, published one of her prose miniatures, "Aus dem Leben einer Buckligen" ("From the life of a hunchback"), under the name by which, subsequently, she has come to be remembered: "Adelheid Duvanel".

Later years For the rest of her life, from approximately 1980, Adelheid Duvanel was subjected to repeated bouts of psychiatric treatment, although she became progressively more distrustful of the practitioners providing it. The divorce left her chronically short of money. She lived with her terminally ill daughter and her daughter's toddler under conditions of significant penury. Her compelling short stories continued to appear in newspaper columns and from time to time there were also further volumes containing compilations of her prose miniatures published. She continued to win plaudits from scholars and critics for her "prose miniatures", but her talent was little acknowledged by any wider readership during her lifetime. At the end of 1986 news came through that her former husband had committed suicide. Towards the end she suffered a protracted episode of memory loss and disorientation, and was advised by one of the professionals whom she consulted to expect such incidents to recur and become progressively more frequent. That would have put an end to her writing, and left her in a situation of abject dependency.

Recognition (selection)

Published output (selection)