Conduct Books for Girls in Enlightenment France by Nadine Bérenguier (review)

Education lay at the heart of the Enlightenment, since thinkers believed that it played a crucial role in bringing about progress. Nadine Bérenguier’s monograph offers detailed close readings of nine authors to uncover the textual strategies developed by both male and female writers of conduct books for girls during the eighteenth century. Although portions of the volume are drawn from two articles dating from 1999 and 2007, the greater part of its contents consists of new material detailing authors’ approaches to the task of writing conduct books, and the types of behaviour their texts offered up for emulation. In particular, Bérgenguier’s careful and detailed examination of prefatory material and of the reviews the works received in the press reveals some of the anxieties surrounding the use of print as a means of reaching a young female audience. This issue is especially acute when the author is male. Her analysis also reveals the difficulties involved in balancing the need to show society’s dangers with focusing on the virtue and modesty required of young girls. And she highlights the extent to which writers were concerned about the effect of learning on women’s social standing and public image. The final third of the monograph focuses on reception and reveals the extent to which extra-textual criteria affected the reception of conduct books. The Marquise de Lambert’s social standing, Mme d’Epinay’s relationship with Diderot, Mme Le Prince de Beaumont’s status as governess, for instance, all colour reviews in contemporary periodicals. A final chapter, on the nineteenth-century afterlives of these Enlightenment texts, reveals the extent to which nineteenth-century biobibliographical compilations drew on the reviews of the eighteenth. A study of the prefaces to these new editions also reveals how the readers’ expectations had changed, as well as the doubts the nineteenth century had about the Enlightenment project itself.