Thérèse-Adèle Husson

Born into an upper-middle-class family in 1803, Thérèse-Adèle Husson was a French writer in the post-Revolutionary period. At the age of nine months, she became blind as a result of smallpox, but this did not stop her from writing more than a dozen children's novels. She also wrote an autobiography, dictated to two different writers, which was sent to the director of the Quinze-Vingts Hospital in 1825. This autobiography was later discovered by Zina Weygand in the hospital's archives, and with the assistance of Catherine Kudlick, Weygand translated the work and published it as Reflections: The Life and Writings of a Young Blind Woman in Post-Revolutionary France. The book is known for being the first French-language book by a blind person about blindness. Husson died in 1831 following severe burns received when her apartment caught on fire.