MLR, 102.4, 2007 "I55 Salons, History, and theCreation ofSeventeenth-Century France: Mastering Memory. By FAITH E. BEASLEY. (Women and Gender in theEarlyModern World) Alder shot:Ashgate. 2006. 358 pp. ?47.50. ISBN 978-o-7546-5354-7. This provocative study proposes no less than a 'feminist revision of theMythe du Grand Sie'cle' (E. Russo, in theblurb on theback cover of thebook). Focusing on the influential salon culture led by women, Faith Beasley retraces the various stages of theappropriation and obfuscation of this richheritage by latergenerations. Not only were the seventeenth-century salons reinterpreted and their role in literary culture redefined, the influence exerted by women through the salons was also misrepre sented and eventually erased from the nation's collective memory. Less concerned with determining the historical 'truth' of the salon thanwith analysing how ithas been 're-membered' by posterity,Beasley offersa compelling account of the rewriting of France's literarypast at the hands of successive generations ofAcademicians and literaryhistorians. Contrary to later representations, seventeenth-century salons were not just 'schools forpoliteness'. They were spaces devoted to literaryevaluation and creation, and con stituted an influential force of French culture. Many of theirparticipants, especially the female ones, were writers themselves and composed novels, memoirs, letters,etc. But above all, theyadvanced alternative literarycriteria based onworldly values such as gout, bon sens,and the je ne sais quoi, aswell as collaboration, effectivelydenouncing thevalidity of standards founded solely upon scholarly reason and officialnorms. In other words, the salons were a recognized forcewith the power not only to produce literature but to impose their taste on thewider literary field.But as the activity of the salons grew, so did opposition to the influence theywere seen to exert on literary critique and production. Moliere satirized precieuses andfemmes savantes, and battles raged over taste, itsdefinition, and itsownership. While bon sens and bon gout con tinued to be identified as the distinguishing traitsof Louis XIV's France, theywere often rendered gender-neutral, divorced from theirorigins, or rejected altogether. What originated in the I67os as a desire to counter the threat posed by worldly standards turned in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries intodeliberate effortsto construct an image ofFrance's cultural past thateliminated thesalons as cultural insti tutions of serious consequence, and especially their femalemembers. As eighteenth century salons evolved into schools of politeness and civilization, the role of their seventeenth-century counterparts was reconfigured so that their literaryand linguistic contributions were forgotten.As for women, instead ofwriters and critics, theycame tobe regarded primarily as hostesses, with little tono influence on the literary field. As Beasley notes, this 're-membering' of the seventeenth-century literary scene was central to French national propaganda of the late nineteenth century. The re building of French morale in the aftermath of the disastrous Franco-Prussian war put the final touches to the reconceptualization of the seventeenth century, felt to represent the ultimate embodiment of the genie national. Patriotism, francite, and 'classical' literaturewere strongly linked. But for seventeenth-century literature to be worthy of being a centrepiece of the national educational system and amodel for Frenchness, female literaryproduction and female literary influence had tobe oblit erated. Corneille, Moliere, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine were made to represent the Grand Siecle to the exclusion of themany voices, male and female, thathad combined to create the unique literarymilieu that had influenced the creation of theirwork. Regrettably, until recent years pedagogical programmes have done little to redress thisparticularly gendered conception of the seventeenth-century literaryheritage. Salons, History, and theCreation ofSeventeenth-Century France not only helps to unearth a past thathas been deliberately buried, thus contributing to the reassessment of a celebrated period of French literaryhistory; by examining the complex interplay II56 Reviews between memory, history, and collective identity,the book also extends and corrects current scholarship on the construction ofmemory. As such it isdestined to become an essential reference for the fieldof French seventeenth-century literarystudies. GOLDSMITHS, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON MARIE-CLAUDE CANOVA-GREEN Correspondance deMadame deGraffigny. Ed. by J. A. DAINARD. Vol. x: 26 avril I749 2 juillet I750, lettresI39I-I569. Ed. byMARIE-THERESE INGUENAUD, DOROTHY P. ARTHUR, M.-P. DUCRETET-POWELL, E. SHOWALTER, and D. W. SMITH. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 2006. xxvii+638 pp. ?90...