, 1914
English literature The earliest mention can be found in
Richard Le Gallienne's 1900 novella
The Worshipper of the Image, in which an English poet falls in love with the mask, eventually leading to the death of his daughter and the suicide of his wife. An image of was used on the cover illustration for the family history mystery novel
A Habit of Dying by
DJ Wiseman. is referenced in
William Gaddis's 1955 novel
The Recognitions. The 1942 novel
My Heart for Hostage by
Robert Hillyer contains a scene where the protagonist visits a Paris morgue to see if a is that of his beloved.
Caitlín R. Kiernan writes about as the model of
Resusci Anne in her novel
The Drowning Girl (2012). The story is deeply tied to the themes and images of the book. Chuck Carlise's 2016 poetry collection,
In One Version of the Story, considers the many fictionalized accounts of as a
meditation on the ways humans confront obsession and loss by creating stories. Referenced as the origin of the CPR doll by
Chuck Palahniuk in "Exodus", a story in
Haunted.
Kathy Reichs'
forensic anthropologist character,
Temperance Brennan, discusses the case with a colleague in the 2021 crime novel
The Bone Code. She is also referenced in
Letters from Paris by Juliet Blackwell, who gave a speculative narrative of in the form of flashbacks, lending her the name Sabine.
Brooks Hansen's 2021 novel
The Unknown Woman of the Seine hypothesizes the story of the young woman before her drowning. She is referenced in
Jodi Picoult's novel
The Book of Two Ways.
French literature Maurice Blanchot, who owned one of the masks, described her as "a young girl with closed eyes, enlivened by a smile so relaxed and at ease ... that one could have believed that she drowned in an instant of extreme happiness". In
Louis Aragon's 1944 novel , played a significant role as one of the main characters attempts to rejuvenate the mask from various photographs. In the early 1960s,
Man Ray contributed photographs to a new edition of the work. In 2012, Didier Blonde wrote a novel called , about a man in Paris who stumbles upon a copy of the mask in an antiques store, and who tries to find out more about the girl it was modelled after.
German literature The
protagonist of
Rainer Maria Rilke's only novel,
Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), reflects: In 1926
Ernst Benkard published , a book about 126 death masks, writing about our subject that she is "like a delicate butterfly to us, who, carefree and exhilarated, fluttered right into the lamp of life, scorching her fine wings."
Reinhold Conrad Muschler's 1934 widely translated best-selling novel, tells the maudlin story of the fate of the provincial orphan Madeleine Lavin, who has fallen in love with the British diplomat Lord Thomas Vernon Bentick and, after a romance, commits suicide in the Seine when Bentick returns to his fiancée. This novel was turned into a film of the same name in 1936.
Alfred Döblin's essay, "Of Faces, Pictures, and their Truth" (), published as an introduction to photographer
August Sander's 1929 collection
Face of our Time ().
Hertha Pauli's 1931 story , which first appeared in the
Berliner Tageblatt Ödön von Horváth's play based on his friend Hertha Pauli's story, written in 1934 and titled .
Claire Goll's 1936 short story "", in which the protagonist peers into a death mask and dies from a heart attack caused by delusion and guilt as he believes he recognizes the face as his daughter.
Max Frisch's 1955 play features as one of several historical figures. U-Boat commander
Herbert Werner mentions having a copy of the cast on his wall in his parents' house in his 1968 memoir,
Iron Coffins. Slavic literature Czech poet
Vítězslav Nezval wrote the poem "", inspired by the story, in 1929.
Vladimir Nabokov's 1934 poem "", written in
Russian, was published in
Poslednie Novosti. It has been argued that this poem has as much to do with the Slavic myth of
rusalka as with the mask itself.
Ballet In 1963,
Bentley Stone choreographed a version of ''L'Inconnue'' to music by
Francis Poulenc for the
Stone-Camryn Ballet. It premiered with a cast that included
Ruth Ann Koesun and
John Kriza. That ballet was moved to the
American Ballet Theatre in 1965, with Koesun and Kriza reprising their roles, and with
Christine Sarry taking the role of the "River Girl".
Film Director
Agnès Varda talks about in her 1988 documentary
Jane B. par Agnès V. where she compares Jane Birkin's desire to be famous but anonymous as the state of . Used in the film The Screaming Skull, in 1958 as the image of the dead wife.
Music "" is track number four on the 2018
Beach House album,
7. German bitpop group
Welle:Erdball included the track "" on their 2017 album
Gaudeamus Igitur. "Rescue Annie" also tells a version of the story on
Frank Turner's 2019 Album ''No Man's Land''. The image of appears in
Michael Jackson's
Smooth Criminal through the character Annie. One of the most outstanding lines in the song, "Annie, are you OK?" is actually the line that CPR trainees are supposed to say while performing CPR on the
Resusci Anne doll.
Photography Albert Rudomine made a portrait of the death mask in 1927. The blissful expression of the unknown dead girl was the inspiration for
Yvonne Chevalier's 1935 recreation later titled
Ophélie. Man Ray in 1966 made a series of surrealist
mises-en-scène pictures of a cast, in one case placing it on a pillow in bed, and these are held in the collection of the Centre Pompidou.
CPR doll The face of the unknown woman was used for the head of the
first aid mannequin
Resusci Anne. It was created by
Peter Safar and
Asmund Laerdal in 1958 and was used starting in 1960 in numerous
CPR courses. For this reason, the face has been called "the most kissed face" of all time. ==See also==