The Search for Lyonnesse: Women’s Fiction in France 1670-1703

Although Mme de Lafayette is acknowledged as the founder of the modern novel, her precise legacy has been understood only in relation to male-authored texts. However, she wrote as a woman, addressing issues that concerned women of her day, particularly the problem of the apparent incompatibility of sexual fulfilment and the institution of marriage. This study seeks to identify how La Princesse de Cleves was interpreted by three of Mme de Lafayette’s most talented women successors and to show how their more sombre and subversive view of society was mediated in works of fiction which have strong affinities with the contes de fees for which they are well known. The novels of Mlle Bernard, Mme d'Aulnoy and Mlle de La Force are significant, not simply for what they tell us about themselves as women writers but also for what they reveal about the origins of the eighteenth-century novel.