Memoirs of the Count of Comminge and The Misfortunes of Love by Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin (review)

With this slender volume, Jonathan Walsh offers access in English to two novels that are useful to both scholars of women's novels and teachers of literary analysis. His translations of Claudine-Alexandrine Guérin de Tencin's 1735 Mémoires du comte de Comminge and her 1747 Les Malheurs de l'amour make these works written by a fascinating early modern woman available in elegant English, one for the first time since the eighteenth century and the other for the first time ever. Tencin authored three complete novels in her lifetime: Memoirs of the Count of Comminge, The Misfortunes of Love, and a 1739 historical novel entitled The Siege of Calais. Walsh wisely groups Memoirs of the Count of Comminge and The Misfortunes of Love, two sentimental works that are much more closely related thematically to each other than to the adventures in The Siege of Calais.

Popular when published, Memoirs and Misfortunes are surprisingly at odds stylistically with Tencin's public persona. While Tencin herself was a scandalous public figure, these novels do not offer the same shock value, but remain solidly in the tradition of the woman's novel begun by Mme de Lafayette. Many tropes with which readers of this genre are already familiar are present in the two novels translated by Walsh: forbidden love, barbarous fathers, spying, lost portraits, dank prisons, cross-dressing women, solitary walks in the woods, and twists of fate.

Walsh's translations are conscientiously done, changing concise, classical French into modern English in a way that is both accurate and appealing to modern readers. In his foreword to the volume, Michel Delon applauds Walsh's careful attention to subtleties such as the varied meaning between singular and plural abstract nouns, and also compliments him on his success in translating Tencin's less-is-more French into "a modern language associated with success and positivity" (5).

The translation of Memoirs in particular is remarkably smooth. At a few points in Misfortunes, a more modern English at times jars with the subtlety of the classical French, although the meaning remains accurate. For example, in the original 1747 (Amsterdam) edition of the Malheurs, "Le Marquis de Crevant fut congédié" (212) becomes "The Marquis de Crevant was shown the door" (92) and "l'impatience de me justifier vint encore accroître celle que j'avois de partir" (212) becomes "my eagerness to set him straight further reinforced my desire to leave" (92). While the few instances of idiomatic English stand out, the English will be palatable to today's students of the genre in a way that sometimes the original French cannot be.

The value of the availability of these works in a clean, modern English translation lies not only in the usefulness of Tencin's novels for research, but particularly for classroom use. In his introduction, Walsh elaborates on the thematic value of these sentimental novels in relation to those of Tencin's contemporaries in both England and France, drawing on analyses by critics such as Erik Leborgne, Pierre-Maurice Masson, Nancy Miller, and Philip Stewart. The introduction further underscores the value these two novels have for students of cultural studies, as they "subvert social and religious norms" (12) of the authoritarian social structures of pre-Revolutionary France. Elaborating on the point with which Delon begins his foreword—the desire of the heroine of the Memoirs to have power over her life through maintaining control of her speech and her body—Walsh also underscores how both novels can be read through a feminist lens: "Her novels, though formulaic in many ways, stand out . . . In an age that saw the rise of individualism, Tencin sought to break down barriers of isolation through a connection with her readers, at the same time revolting against the ethos of self-interest and social pretense...