Synopses & Reviews
This study focuses on fiction written by women in the eighteenth century to demonstrate how authors of the period implicitly examined and resisted patrilineal models of relationship, including the notions of literary tradition and of womens place in the family and the domestic sphere. The authors analysis of fiction from Lafayette to Austen argues that the concept of “correspondence,” as exemplified in epistolary fiction, leads to a deeper understanding of the connections among French and English womens works of the period.
The author shows how coherences of plot, theme, form, and image link a group of over 100 little-known novels representing textual exchanges between female characters to form a subgenre of French and English epistolary fiction, a “fiction of womens correspondence.” More canonical works, beyond the strict confines of form and period that define this subgenre, are reconsidered in relation to it, notably Lafayettes The Princess of Clèves, which is alluded to by several of the later writers. The author also shows how works by Staël and Austen at the turn of the nineteenth century display significant affiliations with the texts of “womens correspondence,” even as they represent a turning away from the conventions that characterize the earlier subgenre.
Synopsis
This study helps to open up to modern readers the works of neglected eighteenth-century women writers, offering serious and sympathetic readings of these novels and recontextualising them in relation to rereadings of works by more established writers such as Lafayette and Jane Austen. It reveals how these writers implicitly examined and resisted patrilineal models and challenges current notions of the transmission of a literary tradition. The author shows how coherences of plot, theme, form, and image link a group of over 100 little-known novels representing textual exchanges between female characters to form a subgenre of French and English epistolary fiction, a 'fiction of women's correspondence'. More canonical works, beyond the strict confines of form and period that define this subgenre, are reconsidered in relation to it, and are shown to display significant affiliations with the texts of 'women's correspondence', even as they represent a turning away from the conventions that characterise the earlier subgenre.
Synopsis
“This is a work of high importance, both methodologically and substantively. Not only does it perform a rescue operation on little-known novels by English and French women of the late eighteenth century, it contextualizes them so richly that it sheds new light on such familiar books as Corinne and The Princess of Clèves. It contributes to the history of sensibility as well as that of womens writing, and it makes its contributions in highly readable fashion, in lucid, energetic prose.”—Patricia Meyer Spacks, University of Virginia
Synopsis
This study focuses on 18th-century fiction written by women to demonstrate how authors implicitly examined and resisted patrilineal models, including notions of literary tradition and of women's place in the domestic sphere.
About the Author
April Alliston is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is the editor of a critical edition of The Recess by Sophia Lee (2000), one of the books discussed in the present volume.
Table of Contents
1. Reading faults; 2. What the Princess left; or, exemplary faults in La Princesse de Cléves; 3. Communicable faults; or, repetition and transmission in fictions of women's correspondence; 4. The spectral mother; or, the fault of living on; 5. Secret communications; or, faults of transmission; 6. Corinne's correspondences; or, the fault of passing on; Epilogue: Jane Austen's drawing room; or, framing common faults; Notes; Bibliography; Index.