Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (review)

This lucid and engaging study, the culmination of more than a decade of research, treats several closely related topics: images and stereotypes of epistolary women, education for girls in France, material goods linked to letter writing, and the creation of self and relation through letters. Bearing a title that glosses Simone de Beauvoir's phrase "one is not born a woman; one becomes one" (337), this book shows that letter writing for French women was "a crucial step in developing a consciousness of themselves as gendered subjects in the modern world" (4). Letter writing was associated with women beginning in the seventeenth century; for elite women in the eighteenth century, it offered a crucial means to display their refinement and foster relationships with others.

Like the objects of material culture it analyzes, this book is handsomely designed. Befitting a book devoted to the art of letter writing, it is elegantly composed. It features more than 100 illustrations, including images of manuscript letters, period furniture, paintings, and delightful rarities such as playing cards on which a young woman jotted notes to a friend.

The nine chapters are organized into four parts. Part 1, "Images," features Adélaïde Labille-Guiard's Portrait of a Woman, analyzed as a challenge to two traditions: genre paintings that depict a passive "Epistolary Woman" (always a reader, never a writer) and portraits of male authors. Goodman argues persuasively that letters connected two worlds (the writer's and the reader's) and that writing and reading letters helped women (who were often confined to a limited physical sphere) to expand their worlds.

Part 2, "Education," shows that women had to walk a fine line between the limitations of ignorance and the excesses of pedantry. In order to "participate in the cultural practice of correspondence," girls needed to learn "penmanship, spelling, grammar, and rhetoric" (31). Goodman discusses well-known pedagogical works and convent education. She describes time in the convent as a preparation for marriage and an opportunity to practise writing letters, in the form of correspondence that girls wrote to their mothers (78). Such skill was vital: "Learning to write the kind of letters that could be read aloud in company was necessary, since the daughter would be expected to write them for the rest of her life" (81). Chapter 4, "Epistolary Education," wonderfully subtitled "Learning to Be Natural," illustrates the interrelated development of "the genres of pedagogical treatise, epistolary novel, and letter-writing manual, all of which taught young ladies how to do what their authors all claimed came to them naturally as women: writing letters" (133). Ironically, men positioned themselves as uniquely able to teach women a skill (letter writing) that was reputed to come naturally to women.

Part 3, "The World of Goods," demonstrates how the association between letter writing and elite women "generated a material culture that came to represent the new tastes, fashions, and values of the age" (10). The essential "epistolary paraphernalia" included "pens, ink, paper, seals and sealing wax, desks and inkstands" (161). Possibly alluding to Carla Hesse's The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton University Press, 2001), Goodman argues that "women did not just become modern: they participated in the modern world in the making" (198). This participation included women's consumer choices. (For a more critical perspective on subjectivity and consumerism, see Richard Dienst, The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good [Verso, 2011].) Writing desks—lightweight and portable, bearing drawers with locks—perfectly blended form and function. Regarding these desks, Goodman notes that "some women managed to accomplish great things on small surfaces" (235). Owing to its habitual association with one specific person, the secrétaire is "the furniture of the modern self " (199, 244).

Part 4, "Letters," focuses on four women who regularly wrote personal letters and for whom these letters were their primary form of writing: Catherine de Saint-Pierre, Geneviève Randon de Malboissi...