In Modiano's novels of the seventies, eighties and early nineties, the young female characters tended not to be very developed, broadly speaking: they were fairly generic ‘mystery women’ who attracted the young male narrator, often leading him to make undesirable acquaintances, and then disappearing without explanation, breaking his heart and giving him a reason to write about the experience. They were often a little, at times much, older than him, and their lives subordinate to that of the male narrator, both in narrative terms—that is to say, they were never narrators—and in terms of sheer content. But this is a trend that has begun to change in Modiano's recent novels; Dervila Cooke, France Grenaudier-Klijn and Colin Nettelbeck, for instance, have written about the more developed female characters in his post-2000 work, all agreeing with Claude Burgelin that ‘depuis quelques années, les romans de Modiano mettent de plus en plus souvent au premier plan des personnages au féminin.’

In this chapter, I will give a chronological account of how the female characters in Modiano's recent work have become foregrounded, with a detailed analysis of two kinds of female figure who have shown a remarkable development in the post-2000 work: the mother and the lover. First I will suggest that Modiano's recent and growing tendency to focus on the young female lover figure has its roots in the pre-2000 Dora Bruder (1997), and trace the ways in which Modiano's failure to satisfactorily identify Dora have stimulated him to explore female identity in the works he has written since, both thematically and structurally. As for the mother, I argue that it was the cathartic writing of the quasi-autobiographical Accident nocturne and the explicitly autobiographical Un Pedigree that seems to have freed Modiano to write more nuanced and complex portraits of mothers in his most recent work; so much so that the figures of the mother and lover begin to overlap significantly, and become the same person—albeit only for a brief space of time—in his 2014 novel, Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier.

DORA AND HER SISTERS