Marie de Sévigné

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Standard Name: Sévigné, Marie de
Birth Name: Marie de Rabutin-Chantal
Married Name: Marie de Sévigné
Titled: Marie, marquise de Sévigné
Used Form: Marie de Sevigne
MS , who lived and wrote in seventeenth-century France, is widely regarded as one of the world's great letter-writers. The standard scholarly edition contains 1,372 letters.
Head-and-shoulders painting of Marie de Sévigné by Claude Lefèbvre, c. 1665. She is in half-mourning, in a pale low-necked gown with puff sleeves and a lacy neckline tied with a dark bow. A grey scarf is tucked in. She has pearl ear studs, a pearl necklace, and dark curls around her face. She wears a slight smile. Musée Carnavalet, Paris.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Marie-Madeleine de Lafayette
Her education was remarkable even for her class. She even studied Hebrew as well as Latin, in which she was tutored along with the girl who later became Madame de Sevigné .
Friends, Associates Madeleine de Scudéry
Her friends and associates included novelist Marie Madeleine de Lafayette , letter-writer Marie de Sévigné , and maxim-writer La Rochefoucauld .
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 Catherine Gore
Like CG 's Cecil he is a dandy in love with his own looks, which in his case include his exceptionally small size (said to be about that of a full-grown mouse). Of concomitant beauty...
Literary responses Barbarina Brand, Baroness Dacre
Lady Dacre's friends called her a Sévigné for her letter-writing, but she told them to destroy her letters. Not all of them complied, but no doubt some of them did.
Barbarina Charlotte, Lady Grey,. A Family Chronicle. Editor Lyster, Gertrude, John Murray.
19-20
Literary responses Emily Eden
The Times Literary Supplement reviewer praised these letters for humour, richness, spontaneity, and wit. The Spectator reviewer likened them to those of Madame de Sévigné .
Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Gale Research.
104
Literary responses Elizabeth Moody
The Gentleman's Magazine obituary of EM bestowed lavish praise on her letters, comparing them to those of Marie de Sévigné .
Gentleman’s Magazine. Various publishers.
84 (1814): 2: 613
Publishing Arabella Shore
In addition to her poetry, AS published at least three significant pieces of literary criticism: essays on the contemporary, active George Meredith and on Marie de Sévigné for the British Quarterly Review in 1879 and...
Textual Features Matilda Betham-Edwards
MBE observed in her introduction to French Fireside Poetry that in France the poetesses have hitherto taken lower rank than the great prose-writers Sévigné and Sand . She mentions but does not translate the unhappy...
Textual Features Mathilde Blind
MB 's other Byron introduction, to her selection of his letters and journals, positions the genre (with reference to human curiosity, and to the epistolary novel as well as to the letters of Sevigné and...
Textual Features Catherine Talbot
CT 's letters often convey her literary opinions, discussing writing by, for instance, Marie de Sévigné , Richardson , Henry Fielding and Samuel Johnson . She also writes of the details of her daily life...
Textual Features Françoise de Graffigny
Compared with her celebrated predecessor Marie de Sévigné , FG writes an informal, colloquial, sometimes headlong style. Her subject-matter includes domestic trivia and expressions of mood, feeling, and opinion, as well as information about historical...
Textual Production Lady Eleanor Butler
Sarah Ponsonby bequeathed the journals to Caroline Hamilton , and Harriet Pigott therefore supposed that they were written by Ponsonby .
Butler, Lady Eleanor et al. “Foreword and Editorial Materials”. The Hamwood Papers of the Ladies of Llangollen and Caroline Hamilton, edited by Eva Mary Bell, Macmillan, p. vii - viii; various pages.
vii
They have been published in several selections: by Mrs G. H. [Eva Mary] Bell
Textual Production Anne Thackeray Ritchie
ATR published one of her favourite works, a biography of Madame de Sévigné.
Callow, Steven D. “A Biographical Sketch of Lady Anne Thackeray Ritchie”. Virginia Woolf Quarterly, Vol.
2
, pp. 285-7.
290
Textual Production A. Mary F. Robinson
In 1914 she produced, in French and again using her married name, Madame Duclaux, an edition entitled Mme. de Sévigné , textes. Years later, in 1927, she contributed the introduction to another edition...

Timeline

1671: Madame de Sévigné of France first brought...

Building item

1671

Madame de Sévigné of France first brought the sheath (condom) to public attention by writing disparagingly of it.

1758: Pierre-Joseph Boudier de Villemert published,...

Writing climate item

1758

Pierre-Joseph Boudier de Villemert published, allegedly at Hamburg, a book called L'Ami des femmes, which remarked on the number and excellence of women writers in French.

By Christmas 1869: Francis Galton, mathematician, scientist,...

Writing climate item

By Christmas 1869

Francis Galton , mathematician, scientist, and eugenicist, published Hereditary Genius: An Enquiry into its Laws and Consequences,

Texts

Sévigné, Marie de. Correspondance. Editor Duchêne, Roger, Gallimard, 1972.
Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy, and Marie de Sévigné. Les mémoires de messire Roger de Rabutin, comte de Bussy. J. Anisson, 1696.
Sévigné, Marie de. Letters of Madame de Rabutin Chantal, Marchioness de Sevigné, to the Comtess de Grignan, her daughter. N. Blandford, 1727.
Sévigné, Marie de. Letters of Madame de Sévigné to her Daughter and her Friends. Editor Aldington, Richard, George Routledge, 1927.