Few women writers or intellectuals of the postwar period have provoked such extremes of response as Marguerite Duras. During her lifetime, when she became the most widely read living French author, she was the object both of adulation and denigration in France. On the one hand, she enjoyed the loyal and public support of friends, critics and exegetes such as Michelle Porte, Michèle Manceaux, Christiane Blot-Labarrère and Madeleine Borgomano. She was also championed, almost obsessively, by Alain Vircondelet, who wrote the first major study of her work in 1972. His subsequent hagiographical Marguerite Duras: vérité et légendes, complete with photographs selected by Duras's son Jean Mascolo, is very much the official version of the Duras story in which he upbraids her detractors. Such empathy and even collusion with the word of Duras is matched in La fiction d'Emmedée, a highly fictional portrayal of Duras by Jean-Pierre Ceton, a younger writer whom she had promoted during the 1980s along with Denis Belloc. On the other hand, however, many critics have taken the view of the writer and journalist Angelo Rinaldi that Duras became a sorry casualty of the French literary star system which simply indulged and exacerbated her narcissism. Her apparent self-absorption and overexposure during the 1980s was put under a harsh microscope by Frédérique Lebelley in Duras ou le poids d'une plume, which Duras tried to prevent from being published. In France her literary style has been comprehensively pastiched and parodied, or simply dismissed, by Philippe Sollers among others, as symptomatic of a late twentieth-century writer.

Certainly, the reception of Duras's work in France has run along familiar political lines.