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.
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 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 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...
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 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 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 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 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 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.

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.