If only Emma had learned to read critically, to find her own words, she might have been able to rewrite her plot and escape the destiny of so many nineteenth-century French heroines.
Language is power, after all.
Colette located the source of her writing in her avid reading of Balzac and Zola. Flaubert, of course, worked with words assiduously, often taking an entire day just to rewrite a single sentence. Samuel Beckett, however, took an original approach. A native English speaker, he is reputed to have said that he wrote in French because it widened his lexicon. By writing in a foreign language, Beckett found new words and expanded the possibilities not only of what he could say but also of what he could mean.