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
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...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Julia Kavanagh
In her preface JK explains her interest in the rise of the novel and argues that novels have become the teachers for good or for evil of many; their power can be exalted or deplored—it...
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...
Textual Production Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette
Jean Renaud de Segrais was a real person, who like Lafayette and Huet (a correspondent of de Scudéry ) was a member of the late seventeenth-century Paris intelligentsia. This novel was translated into English in...
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.
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Textual Features Charlotte Lennox
The Female Quixote a complex generic hybrid. It is a romance (Arabella is more beautiful and more intelligent than any other woman in the story; male characters can be judged by the degree and kind...
Textual Features Susannah Dobson
SD says her previous choice of subjects (Petrarch and the troubadours) was dictated by the feeling that it was well worth while to pass over a multitude of tyrants, whose lives are written in blood...
Textual Features Elizabeth Griffith
EG 's preface discusses the magnetic attraction of novels for the young, and the importance this gives them as a method of instruction and influence. She throws out the expected gibe against circulating libraries and...
Textual Features Julia Kavanagh
JK successfully blends scholarly knowledge with popular style. Her historical and critical opinions are still well worth reading. On the great length of Scudéry 's romances, she cites a contemporary reader who had reached page...
Textual Features Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette
This work is more like the Scudéry type of romance than are MML 's better-known novels.
Textual Features Sophia Lee
An Advertisement claims that The Recess is a version, in modernised English, of a manuscript memoir from the reign of Elizabeth I . It breaks new ground for the English novel in various ways: it...
Literary Setting Hope Mirrlees
HM sets her narrative during a period of female learning and literary productivity in seventeenth-century France. Madeleine Toqueville, a young girl, moves with her parents from their provincial home to Paris, where Madeleine's erotic...
Literary responses Hope Mirrlees
Julia Briggs reads the text as a roman à clef in which Scudéry is an unflattering portrait of Natalie Barney (whom HM would have encountered when herself living in Paris) while Harrison appears as the...
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
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...

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.