Almost perfectly unknown to present-day students of Italian silent cinema, Renée de Liot is in fact a most emblematic example of a woman film pioneer. While her name hardly appeared in both film credits and lobby cards, she wrote scripts for almost all the films played by her husband,  Mario Guaita, better known as Ausonia, an actor who specialized in the strong-men genre. In this paper I will try to shed some light on the work of this quite mysterious woman, highlighting the difficulties of doing research on a figure whose name was never mentioned in period film magazines and whose work has gone completely uncredited in traditional film histories. All what is left of Renée de Liot’s screenwriting work are two films – L’atleta fantasma, [The Phantom Athlete], 1919; Nelle soffitte di Parigi [On Paris Roofs], 1925 – and the manuscript of one more scenario, now preserved at the Museo del Cinema in Turin. By reading and analysing this scarce material, I will try to interrogate Renée de Liot’s writing style, in view of a comparison with the work of other women writers of the time and in search of the traces of a feminine poetry.