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Book Reviews141 in her essay about Yanick Lahens, "the very desire to plunge into the history and culture ofHaiti . . . constitutes a political gesture" (169). I urge readers of this review to ask their university libraries to purchase this volume. Jane Alison HaleBrandeis University TRANSLATIONS Cottin, Sophie. Claire d'Albe: An English Translation. Trans. Margaret Cohen. New York: Modern Language Association, 2002. Pp 155. ISBN 0-87352-926-x. $9.95. Cottin, Sophie. Claire d'Albe: The Original French Text. Ed. Margaret Cohen. New York: Modern Language Association, 2002. Pp 158. ISBN 0-87352-925-1. $9.95. Those interested in women's writing in the late eighteenth century will welcome the recent addition of Sophie Cottin's novel Claire d'Albe to the MLA Texts and Translations Series. Published anonymously in 1 799, Claire d'Albe soon became one ofthe most widely read novels in France, alternately praised for the intensity of feelings it portrayed (Benjamin Constant) or condemned for the immorality of its adulterous heroine (Stéphanie de Genlis). As documented in Margaret Cohen's introduction to both the French and English editions, the popularity of Cottin's text in the early years ofthe nineteenth century should earn consideration for its author in any discussion of the development ofthe novel. Yet, for most ofthe twentieth century French editions proved difficult to procure (although it is now online at visualiseur.bnf.fr/ Visualiseur? Destination=Gallica &O=NUMM-88054) and English translations were relegated to rare books collections in archival libraries. On the surface, the plot of Claire d'Albe contains nothing original: a young and virtuous woman (Claire), given in marriage by her father to an honorable, but somewhat severe man forty years her senior (Monsieur d'Albe), becomes enamored with her husband's nineteen-year-old cousin (Frédéric) who has been received into the family as an adopted son. Despite Claire's initial denial of the passionate feeling she shares with Frédéric and her determination to merit her husband's esteem and her children's adoration, in a series of letters to her friend and confidante Elise, she gradually reveals not only Frederic's feelings for her, but also the intense emotions which threaten to destroy the apparent serenity of her household. In the final pages of the novel, Frédéric and Claire's uncontrollable passion culminates in what Cohen suggests "may be the first depiction of female orgasm in polite fiction" (vii). After this adulterous act, the novel ends predictably with Claire's death and Frederic's disappearance. Despite obvious similarities to Rousseau's Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse, Cottin's novel resonates as more than an exercise in imitation. The author appropriates the epistolary form skillfully to permit both her presumed reader 142Women in French Studies (Elise) and her reading public to glimpse Claire's feelings for Frédéric long before she herself recognizes them. For example, in Letter XXII, Claire all but confesses her love for Frédéric. However, framed as a series ofquestions, her avowal merely reiterates the suspicions previously voiced by Elise. Although the sometimes extravagant language of emotion would seem to place this novel within the pre-romantic or sentimental tradition, Claire's torment in the struggle to maintain her virtue as wife and mother also evokes classical themes transposed into post-Revolutionary France. Her characterization of love as a sickness, her vain efforts to confront a violent, destructive passion with reason, and the turmoil of her guilt all recall earlier texts such as La Princesse de Clèves or Phèdre. Finally, Cottin's novel suggests the expectations for women in the newly constituted ideology ofthe domestic sphere (cf Letter IX). Although Cohen emphasizes the place that Claire d'Albe occupies in the nineteenth-century sentimental tradition, the novel seems to offer much more and promises to become a highly discussable text for the undergraduate classroom : as a reworking ofRousseauvian themes, as a (re)examination ofclassical terms like duty, virtue, honor, and passion in a new post-Revolutionary society, or as a fictional representation of the development of women's roles in the domestic sphere of the early nineteenth century. Margaret Cohen's translation of...

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