Professor of French at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. She is the author of monographs on Proust ( 1968 ), Camus ( 1971 ), Paul Nizan ( 1976 ), and Guinean writer Camara Laye ( 1980 ), and more recently French Women Novelists: Defining a Female Style ( 1989 ) and Camus's "L'Etranger": Fifty Years On.