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
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. http://estc.bl.uk/.
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...
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...
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 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 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 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 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...
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 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 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 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 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...

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 .
Watson, George, and Ian Roy Wilson, editors. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1969, 5 vols., http://U of A, HSS Ruth N Flr 1 Ref.

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.
Schroder, Volker. “Women Writers Response to Boileaus SATIRE XAmerican Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Conference, Boston, MA, 26 Mar. 2004.

1754: The Rev. William Dodd published his novel...

Writing climate item

1754

The Rev. William Dodd published his novel The 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.
Campbell, Ann M. “Sister Plots: The Double in English Courtship Novels”. American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) Conference, Milwaukee, WI, 27 Mar. 1999.

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 epyllion based on Xenophon 's Cyropaedia.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall, 5 series.
18 (1796): 177

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, 10 vols.
Scudéry, Madeleine de. Clélie. A. Courbé, 1661, 10 vols.
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, 4 vols.
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.