Madeleine de Scudéry
-
Standard Name: Scudéry, Madeleine de
Birth Name: Madeleine de Scudéry
Pseudonym: Monsieur de Scudéry
Used Form: Madeleine de Scudery
MS
is the most famous of the seventeenth-century French authors of heroic romances: fictions of great length, which centred on the lives, loves, and philosophical disquisitions of aristocratic characters. She also wrote poetry and letters.
Connections
Connections Sort descending | Author name | Excerpt |
---|---|---|
Dedications | Elizabeth Elstob | EE
published An Essay upon Glory—translated, as the title-page explains, from the French of Madeleine de Scudéryby a Person of the Same Sex. English Short Title Catalogue. |
Education | Hester Mulso Chapone | Hester's early reading included romances such as those of Madeleine de Scudéry
. She taught herself modern languages, music, drawing, and some Latin. At fifteen she was reading theology. |
Education | Elizabeth Delaval | She later recalled how she listened to fairy stories told her by Mrs Carter, how she read out chapters of the Bible in French, and loved the still new and fashionable French romances in their... |
Education | Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis | Stéphanie-Félicité was seven when her governess, who was only sixteen, joined the family. In later years she regularly stressed the inadequacy of the way French girls of her class were taught, arguing in Discours sur... |
Friends, Associates | Marie de Sévigné | Her close friends included the fiction-writers Madeleine de Scudéry
and Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette
(both of whom created literary portraits of her) and the royal mistress, Madame de Maintenon
. Williams, Charles G. S. Madame de Sévigné. Twayne, 1981. 35-7 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Charlotte Lennox | Arabella is a reading heroine. Brought up on her dead mother's collection of French romances, she has been savouring a universal power over men, which exists only in her imagination. For this reason she scorns... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Marie-Catherine de Villedieu | The author claims that Cléonice, a novel of intrigue, is a new form, more realistic than the longer heroic romances of, for instance, Madeleine de Scudéry
It forswears flowery, descriptive scene-setting with a jab... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Anna Letitia Barbauld | The allegorising of emotional life as geographical features blends the erotic, prudential, and comic. Behind this map stands the famous Carte de tendre in Madeleine de Scudéry
's Clélie, 1654-61. |
Intertextuality and Influence | Jane West | JW
's preface invokes Shakespeare
, Virgil
, Homer
, and Sir Walter Scott
(she later adds Thomas Percy
) as more acceptable exemplars for romance than either the French romances (implicitly those of Madeleine de Scudéry |
Intertextuality and Influence | Jane Barker | The title-page (followed by Carol Shiner Wilson
's editiion) says 1715. Such post-dating, says Kathryn King
, is typical of Curll
's publishing practices. Wilson, Carol Shiner, and Jane Barker. “Introduction”. The Galesia Trilogy and Selected Manuscript Poems of Jane Barker, Oxford University Press, 1997, p. xv - xliv. xxiv, 177n1 King, Kathryn R. Jane Barker, Exile: A Political Career 1675-1725. Clarendon Press, 2000. 150 |
Intertextuality and Influence | Damaris Masham | Her letters to Locke begin under the sign of romance, with the choice of a pseudonym probably taken from Sir Philip Sidney
's Arcadia and an allusion (turning on the behaviour of people in love)... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Aphra Behn | The volume opens with The Golden Age, conventionally depicted except for the absence of religion and of sexual coyness in women. A Voyage to the Island of Love is AB
's first translation from... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Lady Mary Wortley Montagu | They include a novel in five letters (Indamora to Lindamira), a verse-and-prose romance (The Adventurer), and poems in various pastoral and classical modes—epistles, lyrics, etc. The novel gives a voice to... |
Intertextuality and Influence | Elizabeth Beverley | The title-page further develops the ship image of the title into a full-blown allegory, a kind of commercialised version of the voyages to an island of love depicted by Madeleine de Scudéry
, Aphra Behn |
Intertextuality and Influence | Sarah Murray | This volume opens with The Plan of a School, and then, continuing a story-line from volume one, with Mrs Wheatley's demanding of Miss Le Maine how she can use rouge and plume herself on... |
Timeline
1693
John Dryden
published his edition of Juvenal
's Satires, translated into English poetry by various hands, including that of Aphra Behn
.
March 1694
The French poet Boileau
published his misogynist Satire X, which targets the poet Antoinette Deshoulières
(who had died in February) as a précieuse, and Scudéry
's Clélie as advocating adultery.
1754
The Rev. William Dodd
published his novelThe Sisters; or, The History of Lucy and Caroline Sanson, Entrusted to a False Friend, a morally oversimplified example of the bad-sister-damned/good-sister-saved plot.
1794
Sophia, Lady Burrell
(with a play and a poetry volume behind her, and further plays and a novel ahead), published her most unusual work, The Thymbriad, an epyllionbased onXenophon
's Cyropaedia.