Histoire de la Marquise

The beautiful Marquise de Banneville meets a handsome marquis, and they fall in love. But the young woman is actually a young man (brought up as a girl and completely in the dark about her-or his-true sex), while the marquis is actually a young woman who likes to cross-dress. Will they live happily ever after?

In the introduction, Joan DeJean presents the fascinating puzzle of authorship of this lighthearted gender-bending tale written in the late seventeenth century in France. Was it Francois-Timoleon de Choisy, an abbot who was happiest in drag? Marie-Jeanne L'Heritier, an outspoken defender of women’s writing of her day? Or Charles Perrault, L'Heritier’s uncle and the famous author of such fairy tales as Sleeping Beauty ? DeJean argues that the tale was a collaboration of all three and discusses the permeable borderline between masculinity and femininity, transvestism, and tolerance-then and now.