Madame De Research Articles

Gewohnheit und Erziehung. Zur Rolle von habitude und coutume bei Montaigne, Fénelon, Du Marsais und Madame de Maintenon

Abstract This paper examines the role of habit and custom in educational writings from 16th- to 18th-century France. Authors like Michel de Montaigne, François de Fénelon, César Chesneau Du Marsais and Madame de Maintenon highly recognize the importance of habit and custom (habitude, coutume) for the education of children. Yet, their opinions diverge with regard to the consequences and the educational functions of habit and custom. In a first step (section 2), I will outline some major positions on the relationship between coutume/habitude and education in Montaigne’s Essais (1580/88), Fénelon’s Traité sur l’éducation des filles (1687) and Du Marsais’ article on „Éducation“ in the Encyclopédie (1755). Two further sections are devoted to Madame de Maintenon and her Conversations (or Loisirs, posth. 1757): in section 3, I will focus on the importance of habit and habituation in Madame de Maintenon’s practical education of girls in the Maison royale de Saint Louis in Saint-Cyr, a school that Maintenon founded for poor noble girls. In this context, special attention will be paid to the performative and theatrical aspects of her educational concept. In the last part (section 4), I examine the role attributed to habit and custom in the text of the Conversations. I will argue that this role, which is strongly linked to the idea of toughening up girls for a future life as a good mère de famille, may be explained by both the historical context of the French 17th century and Madame de Maintenon’s personal experiences.

Spirit of the Age

This essay turns a spotlight on Elizabeth Barret Barrett's unpublished 1822-26 notebook (now in Wellesley College Library). A seldom-cited archival text, the 231-page notebook opens a window on Romantic culture and writers in the years it spans. It also illumines the intellectual and artistic formation of the gifted juvenile author who would become England’s most internationally influential woman poet by 1850 under the name of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The notebook includes drafts of original compositions, memoranda (for example, “Stray Thoughts,” “List of Books I wish to have”), and extracts or analyses documenting EBB’s self-education through wide-ranging reading across genres, fields, and national boundaries. The largest category of entries is made up of review-like commentaries, principally on recently published books, in which EBB hones a critical voice shaped by the periodical press of the period. Writers treated range from major literary figures like Lord Byron, Letitia Landon, Madame de Staël, and Mary Shelley, to others influential or emerging at the time (e.g., Robert Southey, James Hogg, Anna Jameson, James Fenimore Cooper), to authors of memoirs, biographies, histories, and works of political philosophy. Examination of the hybrid form as well as the mixed contents of the notebook indicates that it both participates in the commonplace book tradition and reflects Romantic transformations in that tradition exemplified by Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notebooks. In the process, EBB’s 1822-26 notebook offers a perspective on the mid-1820s very different from William Hazlitt’s in The Spirit of the Age (1824-25); it also demonstrates the budding acumen as a literary critic later expressed in her contributions to Richard Hengist Horne’s A New Spirit of the Age (1844). Notably too, the notebook underscores the cosmopolitanism and engagement with contemporary subject matter that underpins her later artistic practice, especially in her representation of “this live, throbbing” modern age in Aurora Leigh (1856).

Blurred Humanity: The Grandparental Fantastic and the Values of Aging

Abstract: Within storytelling economies of nineteenth-century France, grand-parental authors and narrators operate ambiguously, often relegated to the outworn periphery of social life but still central to the circulation of inheritable tradition and cultural wealth. Further, Charles Nodier suggests, grandparents' age gives them privileged access not so much (or not only) to the heights of wisdom but also to the strangely "intermediary" and often devalued realm of the fantastic. This article sets off to explore Nodier's suggestion by means of five tales—by Clémence Robert, Delphine de Girardin, Madame de Ségur, George Sand, and Victor Hugo—in which encounters with the nonhuman push the grandparental fantastic to scrutinize the unstable values of intergenerational exchange.

Delphine von Schauroth, Corinna-Sister

Despite her current marginal position, the nineteenth-century pianist and composer Delphine von Schauroth (1813–1887) once ranked among the most prominent virtuosos of the nineteenth century and had connections with Fanny Hensel, Ferdinand Hiller, Josephine Lang, Franz Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and others. Drawing on large body of music criticism, as well as compositions, letters, images and literary works, this article presents a portrait of Schauroth as an artist, with an emphasis on the role of improvisation and the improvisatory in her pianism. In particular, the article fleshes out Robert Schumann's characterization of Schauroth as a ‘Corinna-sister’, a reference to the improvising poetess of Madame de Stäel's novel Corinne, or Italy. The article suggests that Schumann's comparison highlights key facets of Schauroth's status and character as a pianist and composer. Firstly, like Corinne, Schauroth was widely renowned as an eminent performer and was celebrated as a genius by critics, which was particularly notable for a woman musician in the early nineteenth century. Secondly, Schauroth was received as a creator, not only for her compositions, but also for her performances: in the late 1820s and early 1830s, in particular, critics responded to these performances with images of magical creation and an emphasis on the newness of her performance over the composer's work. Thirdly, Schauroth displayed a varied practice of improvisation, and her compositions were understood as having an improvisatory character.

Madame de Sevigné i król Jan III Sobieski – mistrzyni i mistrz epistolografii francuskiej i polskiej XVII w.

Madame de Sévignéand King John III Sobieski –the masters of 17th century French and Polish epistolography Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marchionesse de Sévigné (1626–1696) and John Sobieski (1629–1696) lived during almost the same period of time. The marchioness was three years older, they died in the same year. Lady de Sévigné became a famous epistologra- pher already during her life and shortly after she died. Sobieski’s letters got published only in the 19th c. and their literary value was underlined for the first time by a renown translator of French literature, Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, who compared the king’s letters with those of madame de Sévigné. What the marchioness’s and the king’s letters have in common is that these were all private letters to their closest and beloved ones -marchioness’s to her daughter, lady de Grignan and Sobieski’s to his wife, Maria Kazimiera d’Arquien. Due to the distance and longing, a uniquely inspiring epistolography was created. There are of course a lot of differences between their letters, however a number of common threads may be noticed. Many times did lady de Sévigné and Sobieski express a strong belief that their feelings towards the addressees are rare and extremely strong. Similarly, they considered them to possess exceptional traits, not only physical beauty but also outstanding spiritual and mental qualities. In their letters they often articulated their concern about health issues, emphasising that their own physical state depends very much on the condition of their beloved ones. In- spired by Molier’s comedies they knew very well from books and theatres, they would also refer critically to doctors’ opinions. The marchioness was also delighted with her daughter’s knowledge of medical issues and her interest in the philosophy of Descartes, describing it as “cartesienne” and call- ing the philosopher her spiritual father. Although Sobieski’s letters do not contain any philosophical reflection, he is known to be familiar with Cartesianism and to have kept the works of Descartes in his library. What is characteristic for both collections of letters and also unique for this period, is a close and warm relation with children’s world – marchioness’s grandchildren and So- bieski’s children. The grandmother and father used to take a lot of interest in their health, cared about their illnesses, gave advice on intellectual development. In the marchioness’s and the king’s letters some pre-romantic elements are also present which are visible in their attitude towards the nature – e.g. Lady de Sévigné mentioning her night walks under the moonlight and Sobieski contemplating the sunset.

Anne-Thérèse Marguenat de Courcelles, Mme De Lambert – o «gosto» de uma Salonnière protofeminista

Anne-Thérèse Marguenat de Courcelles, Marquise or Madame de Lambert was the author of a significant published work, dealing with pregnant themes and concepts that are consistent with philosophical thought and literary culture in France in the 18th century. Ideas and sources that characterize her writing were mapped – namely the concept of taste; studies dedicated to it in the 19th and early 20th centuries, compared to most recent ones. Highlights are arguments in favor of a critical and “aware” education of women, reflections on moral philosophy and aesthetic considerations based on a plethora of authors from Greece to their contemporaries. She addressed the societal / intellectual phenomenon of the Salon and the Salonières that directed them in the 18th century, inquiring about: common denominators and / or deviations; mutual dependencies; conceptual nuances and repercussions, weighted in the context of feminist studies. Therefore, exclusive characteristics are listed in terms of posture, status and performance. In her Bureau d’ Esprit (1710-1732) “new” ideas of philosophical, literary, moral impact and under the aegis of poetic mediations fermented. Attention was paid to the singularities of her aesthetics and writing of an “epistolary” typology that was intended for her own children. It is finally thought-how much, how and if-her particularities and circumstances had repercussions / contributed to the understanding and evaluation of her work in an academic context and, also, to a French proto-feminist culture.

Chinoiserie in Eighteenth Century France: Francois Boucher’s Imagination of China

Through the eyes of Francois Boucher, one of the most prominent court painters of the Rococo period, this essay delves into the enthralling world of Rococo art. Through the analysis of several of Boucher's paintings, such as "The Portrait of Madame de Pompadour" and "The Chinese Garden", the author intends to determine how various aspects of Chinese culture and aesthetics, as interpreted by Boucher's active imagination, were fluidly incorporated into the Rococo aesthetic. This study examines how Boucher deftly incorporated Chinese design elements, such as porcelain and scent sachets, into his works of art. These components, which are frequently considered symbolic of the Orient, provide a one-of-a-kind glimpse into Europeans' fascination with Chinese culture during the Rococo period. This article demonstrates that the influence of Orientalism on the aesthetics of European art is not limited to paintings but rather encompasses architecture as well as everyday objects, like tapestries, by demonstrating how the fusion of Chinese culture and Rococo aesthetics led to this influence.

Wychowanie i edukacja dziewcząt według Les Conversations d’Émilie Louise d’Épinay

The Raising and Education of Girls as Formulated by Louise d’Épinay in Les Conversations d’Émilie The article presents the views of Louise d’Épinay on the education of girls against the background of her work, taking into account the particularly unusual case of the Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant. D’Épinay presented her views on the education of girls in Les Conversations d’Émilie, a work written under the influence of having to care for her granddaughter Émilie and written, above all, for her. This is an extraordinary pedagogical work in several respects. It was the only work by d’Épinay that was published under her own name during her lifetime. For most of her life, because of prevalent cultural stereotypes, she was against making her work public. The form of dialogues‑conversations, mother‑daughter conversations, makes up the central axis of Les Conversations, and the content has been adapted to the understanding of a small child. The fundamental premise of d’Épinay’s suggestions was a belief in the intellectual equality of the sexes. The opening of cognitive opportunities for girls in various areas, going beyond traditional women’s activities, created an opportunity to shape their mentality, but also led to discovering and learning about their own autonomy, identity, and female subjectivity. Among cultural conventions and stereotypes about the division of gender roles, d’Épinay, who partly accepted them, found an asylum and a reservoir of mental activity, female independence in the private, personal sphere, determined more by a mental dimension than by real boundaries of space and duties. Les Conversations are brave, pioneering views and reflections by a woman about girls’ education, a bold look at who a woman is at her core.

From Madame Chrysanthème to Madame Prune: Triads and Tribulations in Pierre Loti’s Japanese Novels

Abstract The lack of scholarly interest in Pierre Loti’s second Japanese novel, La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune (1905), has obscured the fact that it modifies our understanding of how Japan functions in the author’s imaginary. This article begins by offering a new reading of its better-known predecessor, Madame Chrysanthème (1887), concentrating on the insistent and proliferating use of triads. These structures involve characters (such as Loti–Yves–Chrysanthème), places (Loti–Nagasaki–Istanbul), and intertexts (Loti–Madame Chrysanthème–Le Mariage de Loti). Unlike in Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick’s and René Girard’s theoretical treatments of triangularity, Loti’s use of triads foregrounds the absence of desire, making Madame Chrysanthème an atypical novel in his corpus. Comparison with La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune underlines this: in the later novel, Loti reinstates a fascination with both sexuality and mortality that was absent in its predecessor. Furthermore, because of its status as a sequel, it allows Loti’s use of nostalgia to gain in complexity, offering the coexistence of multiple temporalities in the same experience of the Japanese space.

‘Virtuous Attachment’ and three dramatizations of James’s The Ambassadors

Henry James’s The Ambassadors is considered by many James scholars his most complex novel and his central character, Lambert Strether, a man whose decisions are not always easy to explain to either the reading audience or the other characters in the text. Adapting this work to other media formats presented challenges that, this article argues, were not fully met. One of the major problems faced by the two television versions and one theatrical version of this work is their failure to address what James calls a ‘virtuous attachment’, a term understood by Strether to define the relationship between young New Englander Chad Newsome and his French ‘companion’, Madame de Vionnet. This article examines this issue as well as the particular demands that television and stage adaptations of literary works must address and that these ambitious and distinctive approaches to The Ambassadors faced, including adapting the work into a big Broadway musical.

Eview on the Monograph "Representations of the Family in Two Novels of the 18th Century: “The Parvenu Peasant” by Marivaux and “The Rival Mothers” by Madame de Genlis”, author Ecaterina Foghel, manuscript, 115 p.

eview on the Monograph "Representations of the Family in Two Novels of the 18th Century: “The Parvenu Peasant” by Marivaux and “The Rival Mothers” by Madame de Genlis”, author Ecaterina Foghel, manuscript, 115 p.

Vegetal and zoomorphic imagery as a means of artistic embodiment of the natural/artificial opposition in Guy de Maupassant's novel "Our Heart"

The article is devoted to the analysis of the vegetative and bestiary poetics of Guy de Maupassant's late psychological novel "Our Heart" (1890), which lacks the proper attention of literary scholars both in France and abroad (scientific reflection is focused on short stories and novels of the heyday of Maupassant's realism). Therefore, its poetic study and introduction into the modern literary context is an actual scientific task. The purpose of the article is to define the semantics and symbolism of plant and bestiary imagery in the artistic structure of G. de Maupassant's novel "Our Heart" and to establish its functions in the realization of natural/artificial opposition, that is conceptual for the novel. The research was carried out in the framework of the structural-semiotic method of analysis of the artistic text. The analysis of the novel from the point of view of the artistic functions of floral and zoomorphic imagery proved the special place of these tools in deepening the psychological picture and expressive-emotional expressiveness of the images of the protagonists: André Mariolle and Madame de Burne. The range of these tropes is from vegetal and zoomorphic comparisons and metaphors to elaborate zoo- and dendroanthropomorphic images (Michelle de Burne is first a ‘bird of paradise’, a ‘wild bird’, then a ‘hawk of prey’ and, allusively, an ‘ostrich’, and also an old tired ‘horse’, a ‘nag’; Mariolle – is a ‘trapped wounded animal’, a ‘thrush in a cage’, a ‘small fish caught in a net’). The plant analogue of the heroine is a man-made flower garden, which gradually withers and decays, as her love for Mariolle fades away. Michelle's image is accompanied by numerous floral details that acquire a metaphorical meaning (these are cultural flowers of selected varieties – roses, orchids, carnations, geraniums, lilies of the valley, chrysanthemums, lilies etc.). In contrast to the “artificial” Michelle, the image of the “natural” Elizabeth is associated with wild forest plants – violets, gorse etc. The protagonist is correlated with ramified dendrosymbolism (chestnut, beech, oak, linden etc.) and the image of the forest as a secret liminal space. The symbolism of the wild forest is opposed in the novel by the symbolism of an orderly garden (as one of the options for embodying the natural/artificial opposition). Vegetal and zoomorphic images not only accompany the characteristics of the characters, but are also closely intertwined, passing one into the other (the anthropomorphic image of fused trees turns into the image of a battle between a predatory beast and its victim, plant juices become living blood). Subjective signs of the main character's “artificiality” are the images of stone flowers and stone animals decorating the central spatial locus of the novel – Abbey Mont Saint Michel. So, florisms, dendrisms and animalistic images in the novel perform a characteristic function, convey the dynamics of the feelings of the protagonists, acquiring a metaphorical meaning, and fill the landscape with symbolic details.

Dismantling Idyllic Love: Reading Madame de Murat’s “Anguillette” as a Counternarrative of Disenchantment

Dismantling Idyllic Love: Reading Madame de Murat’s “Anguillette” as a Counternarrative of Disenchantment

Religious progress and perfectibility in Benjamin Constant’s enlightened liberalism

ABSTRACT Benjamin Constant's On Religion was a major effort to include religion within liberal political thought, insisting on the possibility of religious progress and perfectibility. It was also a major critique of Catholicism and of clericalism in any form. And it was one of the most wide-ranging comparative studies of religion since it purported to cover all religions worldwide before Christianity. Constant worked on it for most of his adult life, more than 40 years. This article traces the rise of the language of progress and perfectibility in Constant's milieu, finding roots in Rousseau, Scottish thinkers, Germans and Swiss such as Madame de Staël, Condorcet, William Godwin, and others. He also sprinkled some of his ideas about progress and perfectibility in his wide-ranging political writings. But it was in On Religion that he went into the idea of progress and perfectibility in depth, finding both a universal human need for religion and religious progress in every religion and over time. It may be true that he underestimated the possibility of regress and failure in human development, but nevertheless this work stands as a monument to liberal confidence in a better future.

Fidelity, Betrayal, and Desire: Translating La princesse de Clèves

AbstractWhile it no longer seems possible to speak of an invisible narrator of La princesse de Clèves, the 1678 historical novel by Madame de Lafayette, the notion of an invisible translator defines the work of late-twentieth-century English translations of the novel. According to this view, the translator should remain unseen by the reader and therefore “faithful” to the original text, so as not to upset the interpretive possibilities that Lafayette offers. In fact, however, the translator's infidelity is both necessary and vital to interpreting eros in La princesse de Clèves. The novel itself makes infidelity a form of insight, and Lafayette's vocabulary forces English translators into situations where any choice can be simultaneously unfaithful and correct. Like the character of the princess, translators have conflicting fidelities that should be made visible to fully reveal the richness of the novel.

On the inseparability of reasoning and virtue: Madame de Maintenon's Maison royale de Saint‐Louis

This paper engages with the curriculum at Madame de Maintenon's school for girls at Saint-Cyr to raise and address a set of questions: What is it to teach someone to reason? The curricular materials of Saint-Cyr suggest that learning to reason is a matter of practice. How is one to distinguish autonomous reason giving from habituation or automatic trained responses? How can practices in reason giving informed by social mores have objective validity? Moreover, if we think of the role of a philosopher as the cultivation of rational faculties and recognize that how this role is played is bound up with social norms, by what standards ought we to evaluate whether a philosophical educator is good or bad? Intertwined with the discussion is also a question about the limits of philosophy for the question.

Les Remontrances (Europe, xvie–xviiie siècle): textes et commentaires. Sous la direction d’Ullrich Langer et Paul-Alexis Mellet

It is difficult to provide a definition of a remontrance, particularly when viewed across three centuries and several European countries. Those familiar with the political culture of the Ancien Régime will be aware of remontrances parlementaires, judicial texts prepared by magistrates and addressed to the king in response to a royal edict. A second type came in the opposite direction, from the king to the parlement, reminding the magistrates of their duties, usually in the context of a discours d’ouverture. The editors of this collection show that beyond these well-established institutional forms, many different types of text bore the title ‘remontrance’. While the editors claim to be more interested in the non-institutional forms, half of the texts in this collection correspond to the two types described above. The other half are a varied group that includes, among other things, verse and an engraving. Given such variety, the editors’ Introduction focuses on what characterizes the rhetorical approach of such texts, rather than formal patterns. They note that most remontrances expressed a legitimate disagreement based on rational argument (pp. 11–12). Remontrances often drew on a ‘mélange d’affectivité et d’obligation’ and were written with a view to achieving ‘la réconciliation dans le repos public’ (pp. 14, 16). This is certainly true for the remontrances parlementaires, but only partially for the others. For example, Paul-Alexis Mellet shows that the ‘Remonstrance de Madame de Nemours’ is highly polemical, violently criticizing Henri III on whose orders the Duc de Guise and his brother were killed (p. 211). While it is one of the more interesting contributions to the collection, not least because of the analysis of the text and its accompanying image, it would have been helpful to know (in this instance and in relation to certain other texts presented here) whether the use of the term ‘remontrance’ had itself a rhetorical function. More generally, what were the conditions for the transfer of this title from the judicial to the non-judicial sphere (and from the French to the broader European context)? In an earlier example, we read that the printer of Mathurin Cordier’s text (presented by Martine Furno) gave it the title ‘remontrance’, as printers during this period took such decisions ‘pour des raisons commerciales et de diffusion de l’ouvrage’ (p. 49). The commercial benefit of such a title, or how it might help its circulation, is not explained. All the texts here are interesting in their own right and are presented and analysed rigorously, but they are rarely in dialogue. Each contributor gives their own understanding of a remontrance, with a variety of definitions, some of which do not appear in the Introduction. Apart from the useful reflections on authorial postures and their ethical and political implications, the editors do not do enough to bring out the coherence of this collection, which is nonetheless of interest because of the attention it brings to the remontrance as both a literary form and a type of discourse.

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of Sister Carrie

“Ah! To Become the Balzac of America!”: The Balzacian Subtext of <i>Sister Carrie</i>

A Note on the Early Versions of the Tableau économique

Abstract This article uses materials that have been recently discovered as well as completely new documents, in particular a previously missing copy of the first printed edition of the Tableau économique that the authors found in the French National Archives and that they reproduce here in the appendix of the article. The authors combine these new sources of information with a close reading of materials—in particular the two letters sent by Quesnay to Mirabeau when he worked on the first two versions of the Tableau to provide a largely revised chronology of the conception and circulation of the three early versions of the Tableau. One of the points the authors make is that Madame de Pailly, Mirabeau's lover, acted as a go-between for the two men at that time and was instrumental in convincing Quesnay to share the Tableau with the marquis and to publish it in the sequel of the latter's best seller, L'Ami des hommes.

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson

Reviewed by: Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson Karin Wulf Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World. By Jessica Marie Johnson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 328 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. Three maps precede the Introduction to Wicked Flesh: “New Orleans’ Atlantic World, circa 1685–1810”; “The Gulf Coast and the Caribbean in the Eighteenth Century”; and “Senegambia,” adapted from a 1718 map. These cartographic renderings illustrate the breadth of space and time covered in Jessica Marie Johnson’s important book, but it is her intellectual and historiographical wayfinding that best lead us through it. To pursue subjects such as intimacy and freedom—which have recently gained velocity in historical scholarship, along with topics with longer trajectories such as Atlantic slavery and comparative imperial contexts—Johnson centers the historical experience of African and African-descended women. Her work—drawing inspiration and method from historically minded literary scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Hortense J. Spillers, historians such as Marisa J. Fuentes and Jennifer L. Morgan, and abundant recent scholarship on gender, sexuality, race, and empire—is a remarkable testament to her own research and powers of explication and evocation. At the same time, it brilliantly reveals how scholars are reframing the histories of empire and the violence of slavery around the categories of family and kinship.1 This work has accentuated the contours of imperial biopolitics, illuminating the centrality of intimate relationships to the project of empire by highlighting imperial officials’ voracious appetites for regulating family relations and structures, and above all women’s reproductive sexuality. But Johnson’s argument about how Black women— from Africa into broader Louisiana, the Gulf Coast, and the Caribbean— defined and prioritized freedom for their bodies, their kin, and their futures is the most stunning achievement of the book. Johnson opens each of the book’s chapters with individual women’s stories, moving from Senegal to Louisiana and sweeping through the most [End Page 667] dramatic and traumatic phenomena of the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century along the Gulf Coast: Indigenous resistance and revolt, the intensification of transatlantic slavery, and the shifting of imperial power from the French to the Spanish. These stories show how thoroughly the Middle Passage recast race and gender in a violently hierarchical order. The first tells of Seignora Catti, the African widow of a Portuguese trader and herself a merchant and enslaver, hosting a business dinner at her home in Rufisque in the west of Senegal in the 1680s. Next is Marie Baude, a free, propertied Senegambian woman who testified in 1724 before French Compagnie des Indes officials in the trial of her husband, a gunsmith, accused of murdering a man who had threatened to rape her at their home in Fort Saint-Louis. The husband was imprisoned in France and then deported to New Orleans, and when Marie arrived in Louisiana four years later, the company stripped her of her property, including enslaved people, claiming that she owed the cost of their collective transport on a ship with other slaves. Then chapter 4 begins in New Orleans with the story of Suzanne, who moved out of the city in 1725 to land that the Compagnie des Indes granted to her husband, along with his freedom and his permission to rent her from the company. Next is Charlotte, who, as a fugitive from her enslaver—who was also her father—was arrested in 1751 as she waited to beg a hearing with Madame de Vaudreuil, the wife of the governor. Finally, Johnson turns to María Teresa, a free woman of color who, when the father of her children passed away in 1789, made a legal claim against his sister Perine—another free woman of color—for withholding property that María claimed belonged to her children. Perine responded by contesting the children’s paternity and successfully held on to the property; when Perine died in 1816, her heir, a goddaughter named Silvaine, petitioned to control it. Each of the women centered in this book pursued a vision of freedom with creativity and tenacity. In Johnson’s hands, their strategies contextualized within histories...