Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France by Alison Finch

Abstract

462 Reviews tailed narrative of the history of the posthumous Collection complete of Rousseau's works (Geneva, 1780-82), which was edited by the Swiss Du Peyrou and Moultou with help and hindrance from the marquis de Girardin. Raymond Birn traces the genesis of this edition among the three enthusiasts for Jean-Jacques, the creation of the 'Societe Typographique de Geneve' to publish it, and the commercial disaster resulting principally from two kinds of lawlessness?piracy with price undercutting by the publishers of other collected editions, and the failure of many booksellers to honour their debts to the STG. The two Swiss then fell out with each other over the publication (1788-89) of the second half of the Confessions, and again with Girardin over the claims of Therese and of distant blood relatives (including 'Rousseau le Persan') to the great writer's estate. This fascinating story seems to be based on sub? stantial research of a traditional kind, and to belong mainly to the 'histoire du livre'. It is preceded by a review of some of Rousseau's own negotiations in the period 175565 with Marc-Michel Rey and other publishers, involving the sympathetic censor Malesherbes, which Birn presents under the selective heading 'Rousseau and intel? lectual property rights'. These accounts are flanked by a curious initial summary, and a brief final 'Recapitulation'. The whole bears the mannered title (never explained but apparently Foucauldian) and 'new historical' subtitle above. These frames seem tacked on, 'forging' indeed a more fashionable appearance for the work's contents. Raymond Birn has been rather unlucky, as any of us might be, in his timing. His account and argument are broadly anticipated in print by J.-F. Perrin's '"Ceci est mon corps": J.-J.Rousseau et son "edition generale"', Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 370 (1999), 85-94. Both scholars assert the historical importance of Rousseau's affirmationaround 1760 of his own authorial rights vis-d-vis publish? ers, and the publisher's rights vis-d-vis the state and foreign piracy. Perrin however recognizes more clearly that Rousseau's constant argument was the ('natural'?) need to be paid fairlyfor the literary labour that provided 'mon pain', and his imperative an ever greater anxiety to protect his texts as the vindication of 'ma reputation'. Birn's main section offersto show how that reputation was furthered by the 'discipleship' of the editors of the Collection complete. But his account is vitiated at times by the tendentious attribution of intentions, insufficiently proven, to the various parties. One could wish for more textual detail on the competing versions of the second half of the autobiography. Birn's concluding assertion that 'Du contrat social eventually would replace the Confessions as the Master's dominant text' (p. 229) is very mislead? ing. The initial reception of the Confessions was in fact largely adverse, as Catherine Beaudry demonstrates in The Role of the Reader in Rousseau's 'Confessions' (Bern: Lang, 1991). However, in the longer term that work will be fundamental for Roman? ticism, as Raymond Trousson concludes in Defenseurs et adversaires deJ.-J. Rousseau (Paris: Champion, 1995). Neither of these books is in Birn's bibliography. His study is more solid as publishing history than as cultural history. BlRKBECKCOLLEGE LONDON ROBIN HOWELLS Women's Writing in Nineteenth-Century France. By Alison Finch. (Cambridge Studies in French, 65) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2000. xvi + 316 pp. ?40. ISBN 0-5216-3186-6. The nineteenth century produced a huge number of women writers in France, though until very recently this would have been hard to detect from any literary history.They not only wrote in those genres legitimated by their supposed 'femininity' but also, as Alison Finch demonstrates, produced adventure and travel stories, comedy, jour? nalism that charted the Zeitgeist, political polemics, and gritty realism. If, as the MLRy 98.2, 2003 463 postscript chapter 'England' describes, many of them looked wistfully across the Channel to England, seeing there a culture far more progressive in its treatment of women and their writing (a fact that may well have surprised their English sisters), this was not merely a device to shame their male compatriots: whether ruled by the Right...