Many readers of early theoretical texts by Cixous were disconcerted by her later plays and asked themselves how both types of writing could be reconciled. After her own translation of La prise de l’école de Madhunbaï into English, Jenson relates Cixous’s own ‘translation’ from history into legend as effected in this play (whose protagonist is the contemporary Indian woman ‘bandit’ Phoolan Devi) to the ‘global maternity’ and the ‘writing of the body’, two seminal concepts developed in these Cixous’s famous theoretical texts.