Yvonne Schultz

Yvonne Schultz (18 June 1889, Paris — 25 March 1977, Nice) was a French writer and woman traveler who set several of her novels in Vietnam and, Cambodia, including Les Fiancés d’Angkor (Louis Bellenand et fils, coll. ​“Jeunes femmes et jeunes filles”, 1928 and 1932) under the pen-name Dyvonne (she also published under the pseudonym of Guy de Lussigneres), and Le Sampanier de la baie d’Along (1932, reed. Kailash Ed., Paris and Pondicherry,1995).

Yvonne Schultz spent many years in Southeast Asia as a journalist and novelist, and married in 1928 Ferdinand de Fenis de Lacombe (1877−1966), then Director of the Hanoi School of Fine Arts. After 1938, Yvonne Schultz turned her attention to China, writing the novel series Maman Chine.

“Yvonne Schultz’s writing…illustrates the evolution of colonial literature towards the side of the victims, connected to the reality of social facts. Economic and political crisis hence could become the subject of a novel and enter the field of colonial literature”, wrote Henri Copin and Tobias Rettig (1) about another of her novels, Dans la griffe des Jauniers [In the Jauniers’ Clutches] (Plon, Paris, 1931).

(1) in ​‘Cracks in the empire: reflections of French journalists and authors on the crisis in 1930s Indochina’, South East Asia Research, 19, 4, pp 831 – 853. doi: 10.5367/sear.2011.0075

Yvonne Schultz near Hanoi in the 1920s (photo DR)