Epistolary Passions: Friendship and the Literary Public of Constance de Salm, 1767-1845

The epistolary friendships of Constance de Salm--a feminist and femme philosophe (woman philosopher) prominent in her own time but virtually forgotten today--provide a counterpoint to feminist scholarship that has tended to idealize relationships among women. Salm's little-known, unpublished correspondence from the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals that competition and political expediency excluded from her circle those female intellectuals most like herself. Her closest relationships with women, while characterized by intense attachment, often flourished in the context of radical difference in wealth, status, or celebrity. They were also far more conflict ridden and volatile than were her relationships with men. The relational world of Constance de Salm promises to open up a new history of friendship, and sheds light upon the ways in which friendships among both men and women contributed to the emergence of a female literary sphere in the early nineteenth century. Studying the relations among gender, epistolarity, and intimacy yields a more nuanced understanding of gendered spheres, and suggests the complexity and public significance of the bonds of womanhood in late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe.