Teaching seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French women writers, edited by Faith E. Beasley, Options for Teaching, New York, The Modern Languages Association of America, 2011, xi + 379 pp., $25.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-60329-096-8

Abstract

seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French women writers, edited Faith E. Beasley, Options for Teaching, New York, The Modern Languages Association of America, 2011, xi + 379 pp., $25.00 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-60329-096-8This book is designed for university teachers of undergraduate and graduate students, to give them ideas and suggestions for courses introducing French women of the early modern period. In this it is largely successful, but it goes beyond the status of a teaching aid, and its 32 essays contain much that should be of interest to scholars and readers with a general interest in the period.It is an encouraging sign that the covered this volume, who range from Mademoiselle de Scudery to Madame de Genlis, have escaped from the ghetto of studies and are being presented to students as an integral part of courses on classicism, the Enlightenment, or Western civilisation, as well as more specialist programmes. The intention, as the editor states, is to show how no course on the early modern period can be complete or even relevant without serious consideration given to the works of women writers (3). She is conscious that students who are familiar with the corpus of literature laid down as canonical may be dubious about the importance of of whom they have never heard, and therefore assume to have been marginal or unimportant, but regards this as being in itself a valuable stimulus to a discussion of learning and historical memory. As Allison Stedman states in a chapter which compares the fairy tales of Charles Perrault and MarieJeanne Lheritier, it is not a case of trying to insert women into a past in which they were not present, but of assessing their contemporary popularity and influence. Stedman adduces as justification for her topic the comment that by the 1690s women were outpublishing their male contemporaries a ratio of 38 to 29, salon literary production dominated reading practices and sales, and classical tragedies like Racine's were increasingly being relegated to the level of court spectacle (108). Perry Gethner, writing on Women and the Theatrical Tradition, gives what is surely the best reason to study the women who published plays in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that many of them are thought-provoking and enjoyable to read (85).The book is divided into three sections, covering Cultural and Literary Contexts, Teaching Specific Texts and Teaching Specific Courses. The range of themes is wide, and includes salons, epistolary novels, philosophy and gardens. Some chapters cover topics specific to women's experience, such as the relationship between mothers and daughters, convent writing, domestic violence and divorce. Others pair male and female writers, analysing their differing approaches to history, travel-writing or other genres. …