Ourika

by Claire de Durfort Duras

"Ourika" by Claire de Duras is a novel published in 1823. A young Senegalese girl is rescued from slavery and raised in Paris high society, educated and refined like any aristocratic French woman. But at twelve, she overhears a devastating conversation that shatters her innocence: what man would marry a Black woman? This realization awakens her to the racial barriers she never knew existed, triggering a profound psychological crisis that will shape her tragic fate in post-Revolutionary France.