Claire de duras's haunting portrayal of the young African woman Ourika grew out of experiences with dramatic revolutionary and postrevolutionary events linked to slavery. Her father, Admiral Armand-Guy-Simon de Coëtnempren, comte de Kersaint, was a liberal Breton aristocrat. He played an active role in the legislative arena at a time when colonial issues were pressing objects of discussion, publishing Moyens proposés à l'Assemblée nationale pour rétablir la paix et l'ordre dans les colonies followed by Suite des Moyens. The two works were written in 1791, before the slave insurrections in Saint-Domingue occurred, and published in 1792. As a distinguished naval officer, Kersaint had extensive and deep-seated connections to the colonial world. A liberal presence throughout the various stages of the French Revolution, he ultimately sided with the Girondins in voting against the death penalty in the trial of King Louis XVI. Having denounced Marat and other revolutionaries during the Terror, Kersaint was sentenced to death and guillotined on December 5, 1793. Claire was sixteen at the time. On the maternal side, Duras's mother, Claire-Louise-Françoise de Paul d'Alesso d'Eragny, was born in Martinique into a wealthy, influential family. She was the first cousin of comte d'Ennery, governor of the French Antillean islands. To rescue the colonial fortune of her ailing mother, Duras left France in 1793 from Bordeaux. It was there that she heard the news of her father's death.

Fathers, daughters, and slaves were thus linked in especially painful ways for Duras, as for other women considered in this book.