Héloïse

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Standard Name: Héloïse
Birth Name: Héloïse
Used Form: Heloise
Used Form: Eloisa
Héloïse was a woman of high intellectual ability who strove by several different means to reach beyond what twelfth-century convention allowed her. The texts of some letters addressed to her one-time lover on the topic of the conventual life for women, as well as at least one which warmly recalls their former love, have come down to posterity.
Photograph of illustration of Héloïse from "World Noted Women", New York, 1883. She is imagined in the dress of a lay person, not of a nun, seated at a large table covered in books, apparently writing in a particularly large one. She wears a fairly low-cut dress with flowing sleeves, and has a veil over her hair.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Anthologization Catharine Trotter
The ascription has been subject to some question, since the formerly accepted birthdate for CT made her only fourteen at the time; the date established by more recent scholarship makes her approaching twenty.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
The volume,...
Family and Intimate relationships Hélène Barcynska
In her first book of autobiography, HB always calls Evans the man. Naomi Royde-Smith thought him the most savage satirist since Swift . HB at once quarrelled with Leslie about him. The day after...
Family and Intimate relationships Kate Clanchy
KC 's father, Michael Clanchy , is Professor Emeritus of Medieval History at the Institute for Historical Research , which is a part of the University of London .
“Fellowships”. Institute of Historical Research. University of London, School of Advanced Study.
His published works include a biography...
Family and Intimate relationships Petrarch
The famous beloved, Laura, whom he celebrates in his poetry, has not been identified. He says that he first saw her in a church in Avignon during Holy Week, 1327;
Bergin, Thomas G. Petrarch. Twayne, 1970.
13, 42
she was probably...
Literary responses Elizabeth Tollet
ET 's reputation persisted for some time after her death. Mary Scott praised her highly in The Female Advocate, 1774. John Duncombe (though her posthumous publication was too late for inclusion in his Feminiad...
politics Ella Wheeler Wilcox
EWW set out with conservative views on the Woman Question, though her early experience on a western farm meant that she took it for granted that women would be active and self-reliant. Her gender...
Publishing Antonia Fraser
She followed it with Love Letters: An Anthology, dedicated to Harold Pinter and published in later 1976.
Fraser, Antonia. Must You Go?. Random House of Canada, 2010.
62
Writing about this book in the Times on 6 November that year, AF noted that she...
Publishing Anna Seward
AS compiled a 7-page booklet, Memoirs of Abelard and Eloisa, which was issued at Newcastle with other Abelard and Eloisa material.
The British Library Catalogue lists AS 's contribution as part of a larger work.
Seward, Anna, Alexander Pope, Peter Abelard, Héloïse, and Alexander Pope. “Memoirs of Abelard and Eloisa”. Letters of Abelard and Eloisa, translated by. John Hughes and John Hughes, J. Mitchell, 1805.
title-page
British Library Catalogue.
Textual Features Helen Waddell
Peter Abelard, set in Paris and Brittany, runs from June 1116 to November 1122. It is fully novelistic in style, opening with a passage in which Abelard, as a thirty-six-year-old lecturer, savours his...
Textual Features Marie Belloc Lowndes
In her reviewing capacity she was able to comment on several texts central to the European tradition of women's writing. She called Marie de Lafayette 's La Princesse de Cleves (re-issued as part of an...
Textual Features Alexander Pope
These two poems celebrate passionate love and loss experienced by fictional women, victimised by an unfeeling world; the first is a tour de force of ventriloquism, as Pope persuasively adopts a female voice. Pope's Eloisa...
Textual Production Helen Waddell
Helen Waddell published a historical novel entitled Peter Abelard (in which, naturally, Heloise is also an important figure).
Dated from the Bodleian Library acquisition stamp.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online.
Textual Production Helen Waddell
Abelard figured in her imagination as her ideal man, and on at least one occasion she dreamed that she herself was Heloise (as an abbess and an elderly woman after Abelard's death).
Blackett, Monica. The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell. Constable, 1973.
57-8, 220
Æ
Textual Production Hélène Gingold
HG published the five-act tragedy Abelard and Heloise.
British Library Catalogue.
TLS Centenary Archive Centenary Archive [1902-2012].
247 (5 October 1906): 339
Textual Production Hélène Gingold
HG was inspired to write this play when she stumbled across the tomb of Héloïse and Abelard in the Père Lachaise Cemetery of Paris. She felt compelled to write an interpretation of their story...

Timeline

January 1761
Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his epistolarynovelJulie; ou, La nouvelle Héloïse; it was translated into English the same year by William Kenrick .