Mme Riccoboni: Romancière, Épistolière, Traductrice (review)

The essays in this collection were presented at an international conference on Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, one of the most popular romancières of the eighteenth century. The essays from this conference held in Leuven and Anvers in May 2006 demonstrate Riccoboni’s importance as a novelist, letter writer, translator, literary critic, and playwright who has enriched the canon of female authors and our understanding of women’s status in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Riccoboni has been “rediscovered,” as Sylvain Menant indicates, as an author and a woman with her own story (3).

The status of eighteenth-century women, sexual politics, and inequality in male-female relationships are recurring themes in Riccoboni’s personal correspondence and novels. Her masculine characters—scoundrels, victims, and heroes—are the subject of Catherine Astbury’s essay. Their nuanced portrayals parallel Riccoboni’s evolving literary preoccupations from 1750 until her death (1792). The interplay between pardon and denunciation in Lettres de Juliette Catesby à Milady Henriette Campley, son amie (1759) and Lettres de Mylord Rivers à Sir Charles Cardigan (1777) is the focus of Suzan Van Dijk’s essay, who suggests that such interplay characterizes Riccoboni’s novels as well as the correspondence with her friend Robert Liston. Michèle Bokobza Kahan, writing on the Laclos-Riccoboni correspondence regarding Les Liaisons dangereuses, emphasizes Riccoboni’s precarious social position. A female author, she must negotiate the line of demarcation between her public persona as a professional writer and her private status as a French woman in a patriarchal society. The tension of opposing masculine and feminine voices that occupy differing discursive and social spaces frames this correspondence, both private and public.

Writing and reading, acts of liberation, creativity, and textual seduction, are the subjects of several essays. Writing is an act of selfaffirmation that, according to Wafa Elloumi, defines Riccoboni’s existence: “j’existe donc j’écris ou plutôt j’écris donc j’existe” (23). Youmna Charara suggests that Riccoboni’s Suite to Marivaux’s La Vie de Marianne transforms imitation into narrative creation. Believing that only honesty and authenticity can result in viable male-female relationships, Riccoboni seeks transparency. Nathalie Kremer thus focuses on the interplay between the real and the fictional in Riccoboni’s 1757 epistolary novel Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd. The heroine’s sincerity and Alfred’s duplicity problematize love’s reciprocity, resulting in the substitution of letters for the lover and love itself: “La fiction est un substitut de la réalité, l’univers fictif remplace l’univers réel et la lettre remplace le corps de l’amant” (119). This interchange between authentic and deceptive feelings parallels the relationship between real and fictional letters. Thus, Riccoboni’s dedication of her novel Lettres d’Adélaide de Dammartin, comtesse de Sancerre, à Monsieur le comte de Nancé, son ami (1766) to the British actor David Garrick creates a discursive space that Marijn S. Kaplan views as a transposition of and interchange between real and fictional letters marking the interplay between an authorial present and the novel’s literary destiny. For Marianne Charrier-Vozel, Riccoboni’s correspondence, situated between private and public spaces, negotiates her economic, literary, and personal concerns. The result is “l’autoportrait d’une intellectuelle au cœur sensible” (183).

Riccoboni’s dual functions as letter writer and novelist incorporate a dialogue between feminine and masculine voices that reflects her feminist sympathies. Engaged in contemporary philosophical and political debates, Riccoboni confronts social problems realistically. Marie-Paule Legrand studies Riccoboni’s correspondence for evidence of her suspicion of theory and systemization. Moderation and solidarity, not theories or imposed morality, solve social problems. Riccoboni views death as part of life with a resignation devoid of sentimentality, an atypical attitude for her century. Studying her correspondence and novels, Paul Pelckmans attributes this to her distaste for affectation and exaggerated displays of emotion. For Beata Rajba, the motif of the mother’s death symbolizes women’s struggle for...