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Reviewed by:
  • Ingénue Saxancour; or, The Wife Separated from her Husband by Nicolas-Edme Rétif de La Bretonne
  • Andrew Billing
Nicolas-Edme Rétif de La Bretonne, Ingénue Saxancour; or, The Wife Separated from her Husband. Translated by Mary S. Trouille. (MHRA New Translations, 6.) Cambridge: MHRA, 2017. x + 214 pp., ill.

This work is the first English translation of Rétif de La Bretonne’s 1789 novel, a fictionalized account of domestic violence and sexual abuse that closely parallels the experiences of Rétif ’s own daughter Agnès during her marriage to Charles-Marie Augé. Mary Trouille’s translation, which is accurate, expressive, and highly readable, is a companion piece to her excellent annotated scholarly edition of the original French work, published in the MHRA Critical Texts series in 2014 (see my review in FS, 69 (2015), 393–94). From the critical apparatus of the 2014 edition, Trouille’s translation retains—in a very lightly revised form—her critical Introduction; information about the composition, sources, and publication history of the novel; biographical information about Rétif; and helpful explanations of her editorial decisions and abridgments. With the exception of a ‘Chronology of Agnès Rétif ’s Story’, however, and of the novel’s two postscripts (which are retained but placed at the end of the translation), the 2017 work lacks most of the 2014 edition’s French-language appendices, including its excerpts from Rétif ’s autobiographical Monsieur Nicolas, his correspondence concerning his daughter’s marriage, his diary, and his ‘Supplément à La Femme séparée’. These elisions appear to reflect differences in emphasis between the MHRA Critical Texts series, which aims to provide ‘affordable critical editions’ of lesser-known literary texts either not in print or difficult to obtain, and the MHRA New Translations series, whose objective is to provide ‘new translations of imperfectly translated or untranslated works of aesthetic and intellectual importance’. Moreover, Trouille’s annotations methodically refer readers to the 2014 French edition for its untranslated appendices, where pertinent. Since those who read French would probably prefer to consult the 2014 edition exclusively, however, the editorial decision not to provide a full translation of the appendices risks frustrating a serious but non-francophone scholar. Meanwhile, if the objective of the translation is not just to cater to scholars but to make Rétif ’s novel accessible to a broader English-speaking readership, then a more comprehensive revision of its Introduction and critical apparatus than provided here would seem desirable. To take an example, the translation’s critical bibliography is identical to that of the 2014 French edition, where most works cited are also in French and inaccessible to the non-francophone reader. It is true that this translation’s publication might help remedy a relative lack of English-language criticism on Ingénue and Rétif more generally. Yet a new bibliography might have been conceived that contextualized the translation via a wider range of comparative and English-language sources, whether in the domains of eighteenth-century [End Page 282] marriage law, domestic violence and spousal abuse, or incest (and that, at the least, included the essay by Christine Roulston discussed twice in this edition’s revised Introduction: ‘Marriage, Sexuality, and the Meaning of the Wedding Night in Eighteenth-Century France’, in Heteronormativity in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture, ed. by Ana de Freitas Boe and Abby Coykendall (Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 59–76). These reservations notwithstanding, Trouille has provided an excellent translation of a significant and topical work in a format suitable for an advanced undergraduate or graduate seminar, and that will also serve as a reference translation for critical discussion in anglophone fora.

Andrew Billing
Macalester College
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