The Hermitage, the debut novel from French author and playwright Marie Bronsard, is a compelling and heartbreaking soliloquy, a farewell to a lover long gone and to the self-imposed exile undertaken by the woman he left behind. On her last night of isolation, the narrator looks back at the almost ten years she has spent as a recluse, reexamining and recording her feelings of tragedy and loss in a final letter to her lover. In the process she sheds her old identity and, with the rising sun, steps into a new self-more redemptive, more hopeful. No longer a discarded object, she passes through an open door, cured of this lover but not of love, her fate unknown but finally her own.

The French edition of L'Ermitage was published in 1986, and a theatrical adaptation was produced at the Avignon Theater Festival in 1994.