Madeleine de Scudéry

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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.
Oval head-and-shoulders engraving of Madeleine de Scudéry by Charles Devrits, from his "Poètes normands: portraits gravés", 1845. She wears a jewelled brooch at her low V-neck, a string of pearls, and a dark shawl wrapped around her. Her dark curly hair is partly tied back, partly in ringlets around her face.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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
Textual Production Marie-Catherine de Villedieu
Her next play, Nitétis, performed in 1663 and published in 1664, came not from ancient Rome but from Scudéry 's Artamène; ou, Le grand Cyrus.
Kuizenga, Donna. “Madame de Villeneuve”. Seventeenth-Century French Writers, edited by Françoise Jaouen, Gale.
386
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...
Literary responses Violet Trefusis
Hunt the Slipper has been received as one of VT 's strongest works. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer noted that [i]ts theme recalls those emotional Baedekers of the seventeenth century in which Mlle de Scudéry
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Ann Thicknesse
AT makes it clear she is no proto-feminist: If women are thought to possess minds less capable of solid reflection than men, they owe this conjecture entirely to their own vanity, and erroneous method of...
Intertextuality and Influence Susan Smythies
The novel offers in passing an amusing catalogue of an old-fashioned library, whose first items are heroic romances like Ibraham; Cassandra; Cleopatra [by Madeleine de Scudéry and Gauthier de La Calprenède ]. Several...
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.
35-7
Intertextuality and Influence Sappho
Sappho has inspired many original English poems, including John Lyly 's Sapho and Phao [sic], 1584; Alexander Pope 's Sapho to Phaon, 1712, and Eloisa to Abelard, 1717; and Mary Robinson 's...
Intertextuality and Influence Lady Hester Pulter
In the same volume as her poems, LHP 's scribe copied the first part of The Unfortunate Florinda. Pulter herself made some corrections, and her unfinished draft of the second part, on loose sheets...
Intertextuality and Influence Jane Porter
JP 's original introduction (to which she later added further memories of colourful Scots characters from her childhood in Edinburgh) mentions exhaustive consultation of historians, and makes no direct allusion to the verse romance...
Intertextuality and Influence Mary Pix
Belinda (a reader of Scudéry who has adopted a romance name) flees her home in resistance against an arranged marriage, and meets Sir Charles, a younger son who has gone through with an arranged marriage...
Intertextuality and Influence Julia O'Faolain
The topics covered in richly informative detail, far too many to enumerate, include a father's life-or-death rights over his offspring in ancient Greece, while such topics as buying and selling sex, or the relation...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Judith Sargent Murray
She backs this pleasure in modernity with a remarkable grasp of former female history and of the women's literary tradition in English and its contexts. She mentions the Greek foremother Sappho , the patriotic heroism...
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...
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...

Timeline

1693: John Dryden published his edition of Juvenal's...

Writing climate item

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...

Writing climate item

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 novel...

Writing climate item

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...

Women writers item

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.

Texts

Scudéry, Madeleine de. An Essay Upon Glory. Translator Elstob, Elizabeth, Printed for J. Morphew, 1708.
Scudéry, Madeleine de. Artamène; ou, Le grand Cyrus. A. Courbé, 1653.
Scudéry, Madeleine de. Clélie. A. Courbé, 1661.
Scudéry, Madeleine de et al. “Discours de la gloire”. Recueil de quelques pieces de prose et de vers, Pierre Le Petit, 1671.
Scudéry, Madeleine de. Ibrahim. A. de Sommauille, 1641.
Scudéry, Madeleine de. Les femmes illustres. A. de Sommauille & A. Courbé, 1642.
Scudéry, Madeleine de. Mademoiselle de Scudéry. Editors Rathery et Boutron, Edme Jacques Benoît and Boutron, L. Techener, 1873.