Gender, Authenticity, And the Missive Letter in Eighteenth-century France

"In 1761, Marie-Anne de La Tour wrote to Jean-Jacques Rousseau claiming to be the real-life embodiment of his fictional heroine, Julie of La Nouvelle Heloise. The two went on to exchange 175 letters over some fifteen years. Since its first publication in 1803, this correspondence has been cited as evidence of widely varying conclusions: the neurotic meanness of Rousseau's character, the abuse to which Rousseau himself was subjected by the French reading public, even the psychosis eighteenth-century women readers risked by cultivating loss of self through novel reading. De La Tour has been diagnosed as the very type of the hysterical woman reader, quite incapable of separating the author from the man.".

"This study will particularly appeal to scholars of gender studies, but will also interest eighteenth-century specialists, reader-response critics, and any critic interested in the epistolary genre. Dr. McAlpin compares the evidence of de La Tour's authorial consciousness with that of far better known letter writers, both women (Sevigne, Graffigny, Lespinasse, Roland, Suzanne Necker) and men (Boswell, in particular). The book also introduces the exchange of letters to the English-speaking community of eighteenth-century scholars. While the de La Tour-Rousseau exchange was republished in French in 1998, it is not yet available in English. This book provides translations of the first, most significant letters in its appendix."--BOOK JACKET.