Jacqueline Harpman’s Posthumous BookTok Triumph
Jacqueline Harpman, the Belgian writer and psychoanalyst who died in 2012, has become one of the most unlikely literary sensations of the decade. Her 1995 feminist science fiction novel I Who Have Never Known Men has sold more than 800,000 copies in North America alone, nearly 30 years after its original publication and 14 years after her death, according to The New Yorker.
The novel’s remarkable resurgence is largely attributed to BookTok, the book-reading community on TikTok with more than 52 million videos, which has transformed the obscure Belgian novel into a viral phenomenon. Described as a “Gen Z Handmaid’s Tale,” the book has been compared to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Octavia Butler’s Parable series, resonating deeply with a younger generation navigating dystopian anxieties.
A Novel Rediscovered
I Who Have Never Known Men tells the story of a girl imprisoned in an underground cage with 39 other women, monitored by silent male guards. When the guards mysteriously flee, the women escape to an immense barren plain where they build a community and gradually die off, one by one, until only the narrator remains. The novel was a finalist for the Prix Femina in 1995 but initially found little commercial success in English translation.
The book’s revival began when Transit Books, an independent nonprofit publisher in Oakland, California, reissued the novel in 2022 with a revised translation by Ros Schwartz. “It sold what you would expect for a Belgian book in translation that came out 30 years ago,” Transit publisher Adam Z. Levy told The Cut, meaning a couple thousand copies initially. But by 2024, annual sales in the United States had surpassed 100,000 copies, and the novel has since been translated into 23 to 27 languages.
Why It Resonates
The novel’s themes of dystopia, authoritarian society, the threat of patriarchy, resistance, and sisterhood have struck a chord with contemporary readers. Belgian author Gaea Schoeters, writing in De Standaard, called it “a coming-of-age novel with a protagonist without a future,” adding that it’s “no wonder this story resonates with Gen Z.” The book addresses the existential question of what makes a person human when everything is taken away.
BookTok reviewers have been instrumental in the novel’s success. Hali Brown, who runs the Books on the Bedside TikTok account, told The Guardian that the book is “quite bleak but incredibly powerful. It was unbelievably gripping for something so desperate.” She noted that “there’s lots happening in terms of women feeling like things are going backwards,” making the novel’s political understanding of the world relatable to many young women.
Susan Watkins, professor of women’s writing at Leeds Beckett University, explained that dystopian fiction allows readers to “identify with someone who’s resisting the totalitarian or authoritarian world in which they’re placed.” For readers who perceive threats to women’s reproductive rights and sexual liberty, “they’re seeing something of that in the text.”
A Life of Resilience
Harpman’s own life story adds depth to her fiction’s resonance. Born in Etterbeek, Brussels in 1929 to a Belgian-Jewish family, she fled with her family to Casablanca, Morocco, when the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940. A large part of her paternal family was killed at Auschwitz, as documented on Wikipedia. After the war, she studied medicine at the Université libre de Bruxelles but contracted tuberculosis and spent two years recovering in a sanatorium, where she began writing.
Harpman published her first works in the late 1950s, winning the Prix Victor-Rossel in 1959, but she composed the majority of her 25-plus novels from her 50s through her 70s. She trained as a psychoanalyst, qualifying in 1980, and continued writing and practicing psychoanalysis until her death from cancer in 2012.
A Growing Legacy
This summer, Transit Books published We Were Forbidden, a collection of three of Harpman’s stories never before translated into English, including the post-apocalyptic The Ardennes Forest and the autobiographical In Quarantine. The New Yorker’s Katy Waldman wrote that for readers who discovered Harpman through her “melancholic digital afterlife,” the collection “will arrive as a revelation.” Transit plans to publish three more of Harpman’s books over the next three years.
Harpman’s posthumous fame has also reached Belgium, where VRT NWS reports that nearly a million people have her work on their Goodreads reading lists. She was honored with a Google Doodle on her birthday in July 2024, and Dua Lipa’s book club Service95 recommended the novel. An ILFU Classics event dedicated to Harpman is planned for September 2026 in Utrecht, Netherlands.
Belgian authors have noted that the novel’s success highlights the dominance of English-language publishing in determining which books break through globally. As Annelies Verbeke told VRT NWS, “If a book is picked up in the US or UK, it suddenly reaches the world.” Yet Harpman’s work, as critics note, is at its best in its original French, “full of subtle humor.”
What’s Next
As Transit Books continues to publish Harpman’s work in English, and as the ILFU Classics event approaches, her legacy appears secure. The New Yorker’s Waldman captured the essence of her enduring appeal: “Her books attest to the potential for solitary selves to meet, merge, and multiply, producing something more beautiful and enduring than they can alone.” For a writer who achieved her greatest success after death, that may be the most fitting tribute of all.