In 1995, Belgian author Jacqueline Harpman published Moi qui n’ai pas connu les hommes (I Who Have Never Known Men) – and watched it fail. The novel follows 40 women imprisoned in a cage within an underground bunker, the youngest of whom is our narrator. They are watched constantly by silent male guards.
Neither the women nor the reader know why they are there – only that they were taken, and that these men now control every aspect of their lives. Philosophical, haunting, and dystopian, the book received some positive reviews, though others unfavourably compared it to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, published a decade earlier. It became the first of Harpman’s novels to be translated into English – but quickly vanished into obscurity.
Temporary failure meant little to Harpman. Born in Etterbeek in 1929, she fled with her family to Morocco when the Nazis invaded Belgium in 1940. Her father was a Dutch-born Jew, and many members of her extended family were murdered at Auschwitz. The Harpmans only returned home after the war.
In 1948, she contracted tuberculosis and spent two years bedridden, experimenting with what would become an unfinished novel. She eventually wrote 15 books, winning several literary accolades, including the Prix Médicis for Orlanda (1996), the novel that followed I Who Have Never Known Men.
But it wasn’t until 2018 – six years after her death – that the fortunes of her science-fiction novel began to shift. In the London offices of Penguin, a curious salesperson plucked a forgotten copy of its original English edition off a dusty shelf.
“This was a copy of the original publication, first titled The Mistress of Silence, back in the mid-90s,” recalls Nicholas Skidmore, publishing director at Penguin. He has no idea how the book ended up in their office – nor why it caught his colleague’s attention, “especially with that title.”
But the colleague was captivated. Soon, the team agreed: its dystopian premise and eerie “otherworldliness” would resonate with contemporary readers. It was just over a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, and The Handmaid’s Tale had returned to bestseller charts following its hit TV adaptation.
In 2019, Vintage Books reached out to Ros Schwartz, the book’s award-winning translator, with an unexpected question: would she consider revisiting her translation for a reissue?
“It didn’t go anywhere the first time. It sold a few copies a year, then disappeared without a trace. I thought, ‘Why would you want to republish a book that wasn’t very successful?’” Schwartz recalls. Still, she didn’t question the decision for long. “They knew what they were doing.” Clearly, they did.
By 2024, the reissued edition had sold 45,000 copies – an elevenfold increase on 2022 sales. Today, the novel is a staple on booksellers’ shelves and has even featured on Service95, Dua Lipa’s newsletter, book club, and cultural platform.
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Then came BookTok – the sprawling online community of readers. There, an abbreviated version of the title, IWHNKM, quickly became a popular hashtag, with users dubbing it Gen Z’s answer to The Handmaid’s Tale. After that, says Skidmore, it caught fire. “I’ve spent the last five years watching the sales rise steadily – and telling people, just wait until next year!”
How did this happen? How does a novel that sank without trace in 1995 become essential reading nearly 30 years later?
Schwartz admits there’s “no exact science”. But when a novel’s core premise is a search for knowledge – a desperate attempt to understand how things came to be the way they are – its resurgence feels like literary justice. Like the women in the bunker, we can only construct theories as to why readers today are, finally, ready to live in Harpman’s bleak vision.
Still, Schwartz has a theory of her own. When Vintage contacted her about the reissue, she made one request: to revise her original translation.
“I’ve learned a little since then,” she laughs. One of the criticisms of the original edition was that the narrator sounded too sophisticated for her age and isolated upbringing – though Schwartz believes that may have reflected Harpman’s voice more than the character’s.
“Harpman was incredibly erudite. She wrote several books that were almost like Proust, in her own kind of language.” For the reissue, Schwartz softened the more Latinate phrasing and introduced contractions – couldn’t, didn’t, and so on. Her original version had been more direct; this time, she made Harpman’s complex, “Proustian” prose more accessible.
Another factor in the novel’s success is its brevity. At just 188 pages, with an unbroken narrative, I Who Have Never Known Men can be read in a single sitting. For a generation raised on social media, with limited attention spans, that matters. Its novella-like length became an advantage.
Skidmore also believes the retitled version works better. “The Mistress of Silence was not a very appealing title and I Who Have Never Known Men is as beautifully strange and as emotionally awkward as the book’s narrator.”
But the novel’s resurgence is, inevitably, also political. “It resurfaced in a world that many readers were struggling to comprehend,” Skidmore says. “It lingers on the emotional prospect of what it’s like to be cut off from others.” Reading, always a form of escapism, now serves as a lifeline – just as it might have for readers in the 1990s.
And while Harpman never ties her dystopia to a specific time or event, her politics are palpable. We never learn what disaster has caused the women’s world to collapse: war, religion, ideology – it could be any or all of them. Nor do we know whether they’ve been locked out of a fascist regime or a failed democracy.
What we do recognise is a familiar kind of upheaval – the same kind the Harpmans must have felt fleeing Belgium in 1940. This is the novel’s enduring appeal. Readers will always want to know: What happens if the very worst occurs?
Eleanor Longman-Rood is the digital editor of The New World
