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
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...
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 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...
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 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...
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 Features Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette
This work is more like the Scudéry type of romance than are MML 's better-known novels.
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...
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 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...
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...
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/.
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...
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...

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