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Reviewed by:
  • Félicité de Genlis: Motherhood in the Margins, and: Madame de Genlis: Littérature et éducation
  • Marshall C. Olds
Robb, Bonnie Arden . Félicité de Genlis: Motherhood in the Margins. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008. Pp. 298. ISBN 978-0-87413-000-0
Bessire, François, and Martine Reid , eds. Madame de Genlis: Littérature et éducation. Mont-Saint-Aignan: Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2008. Pp. 337. ISBN 978-2-87775-461-3

We are clearly at a new moment with respect to literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when a monograph and a substantial collection of essays should appear simultaneously on an author largely discredited by official literary history for close to two centuries. Widely read through the early years of the Restoration, Mme de Genlis never made it into the new literary canon that began to be formed in the late 1820s and became institutionalized by Sainte-Beuve at mid-century. The reasons for the exclusion were as much political as the result of changing tastes, and the refusal to acknowledge her role, and that of the many other women novelists prior to, and after, [End Page 305] 1830, has created a black hole in literary histories that continues today. Fortunately, good scholarship is beginning to fill in the details.

Bonnie Arden Robb has given us a clear and well-researched book that brings to the growing number of studies on Mme de Genlis an especially diverse range of topics accounting for her contribution to the novel from the period just before the Revolution of 1789 to 1830, which was the year of her death. Genlis was a well-known figure in her lifetime, praised and attacked in equally generous measure, and Robb is perfectly justified in helping us see the extent to which certain aspects of that life played a part in the composition of the novels and other works. Robb's aim is to account for the literature on its own terms, but also to give us a needed, if partial, literary and social history of a period that has suffered scholarly neglect, both in terms of historical and literary studies. Genlis's life was a part of that social history.

The "Motherhood" of the title refers at once to Genlis's own maternity – she had legitimate and possibly illegitimate children of her own, adopted others, and took in still more – and to the theme of maternal love and responsibility that is important to many of her works, helping to redefine motherhood and childhood after Rousseau in post-Revolutionary France. Robb ties maternity to teaching, too, to the pedagogical use that many of Genlis's works were intended or, when not, to the didactic tone or content they contained. Genlis founded a school in Paris at Bellechasse, was famously the tutor of the future Louis-Philippe (and notoriously the mistress of L-P's father, the duc de Chartres). She was also an accomplished if not brilliant harpist, taught that instrument, and wrote an instructional method for it.

Robb's contributions that will doubtless be of interest to readers of Nineteenth-Century French Studies are in her chapters on literature, which she presents according to the different genres practiced, substantially developed, and perhaps even invented by Genlis. The most significant of these are the sentimental and historical novels. Robb is acute in her study of Genlis's practice in both genres, though if one minor disappointment can be registered from reading Professor Robb's study, it is that she has written it too much (in the eyes of this dix-neuvièmiste!) from the standpoint of the eighteenth century (presumably the "long eighteenth century"). Her work nevertheless provides a solid foundation from which nineteenth-century scholars can establish the necessary links between Genlis and her contemporaries with the strong presence of the sentimental novel in Balzac and Stendhal, and the undeniable importance of Genlis's conception of the historical novel in the debate surrounding the arrival of the Scotian model.

Among the minor genres practiced by Mme de Genlis is the journal imaginaire, a wholly fictitious newspaper, with invented reviews, analysis of...

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