5 - Seventeenth-Century French Women Writers and the Novel: A Challenge to Literary History

Summary

This chapter challenges the standard narrative associated with the woman writer and the rise of the novel according to which an antisocial woman requires a separate, private space to create works that she delivers to the world anonymously, if she dares to publish them at all. When we return to seventeenth-century France, the period when the novel first came into its own, we discover a history of the genre, its practitioners and its consumers that upends this reductionist and stereotypical history. In France the novel arises out of a culture of collaboration and conversation, where women played a pivotal and determining role. Women influenced the novel form itself in addition to adding their own texts. The chapter presents the argument that collaboration and conversation, which were the hallmarks of a unique salon culture created and dominated by women, were at the heart of the genesis of the novel and influenced and shaped France’s Republic of Letters as whole. An examination of these particular characteristics illuminates the particular form the novel took in France, the influence women exerted on the novel, and why it was their creative genre of choice.