A Model for the British Fair? French Women’s Life Writing in Britain, 1680–1830

Abstract

French women’s life writing has been a fruitful topic for Anglo-American scholars. Dena Goodman’s 2009 Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters focuses on the private world of female epistolarity, eschewing a study of the published woman writer and turning instead to women who write. Goodman demonstrates convincingly that letter-writing was, for the French woman, ‘a crucial step in developing a consciousness of themselves as gendered subjects in the modern world’, life writing in which they constructed their identities through coded and revelatory exchanges with private correspondents.² In Joan Hinde Stewart’s 2010 study of women’s letters in eighteenth-century France, her subjects are all published authors, the grandes dames of eighteenth-century French letters. Through an examination of their unpublished work — the letters of prominent writers and salonnières Françoise de Graffigny, Marie Riccoboni and Isabelle de Charrière, and their attitude to ageing — Stewart writes a book ‘about the ways in which a group of older women claimed ownership of their lives’.³ She does not emphasize that her topic is life writing, but of course it is: Graffigny’s (1695–1758) letters are read as ‘an unparalleled source of information about the intimate organization of an eighteenth-century woman’s life’, with no detail too personal or trivial to narrate ‘neither her crystal goblets nor her satin slips, neither her debts, nor her menses’.⁴

It is well known that the Ladies abroad, particularly in France, value themselves and are greatly extolled for their Skill in writing letters; and surely the British Fair are not inferior to them in Understanding.

(The Ladies Complete Letter-Writer (1763))¹