Héloïse

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Standard Name: Héloïse
Birth Name: Héloïse
Used Form: Heloise
Used Form: Eloisa
Héloïse was a woman of high intellectual ability who strove by several different means to reach beyond what twelfth-century convention allowed her. The texts of some letters addressed to her one-time lover on the topic of the conventual life for women, as well as at least one which warmly recalls their former love, have come down to posterity.
Photograph of illustration of Héloïse from "World Noted Women", New York, 1883. She is imagined in the dress of a lay person, not of a nun, seated at a large table covered in books, apparently writing in a particularly large one. She wears a fairly low-cut dress with flowing sleeves, and has a veil over her hair.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Literary responses Elizabeth Tollet
ET 's reputation persisted for some time after her death. Mary Scott praised her highly in The Female Advocate, 1774. John Duncombe (though her posthumous publication was too late for inclusion in his Feminiad...
Anthologization Catharine Trotter
The ascription has been subject to some question, since the formerly accepted birthdate for CT made her only fourteen at the time; the date established by more recent scholarship makes her approaching twenty.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
The volume,...
Textual Production Helen Waddell
Helen Waddell published a historical novel entitled Peter Abelard (in which, naturally, Heloise is also an important figure).
Dated from the Bodleian Library acquisition stamp.
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.
Textual Production Helen Waddell
Abelard figured in her imagination as her ideal man, and on at least one occasion she dreamed that she herself was Heloise (as an abbess and an elderly woman after Abelard's death).
Blackett, Monica. The Mark of the Maker: A Portrait of Helen Waddell. Constable.
57-8, 220
Æ
Textual Features Helen Waddell
Peter Abelard, set in Paris and Brittany, runs from June 1116 to November 1122. It is fully novelistic in style, opening with a passage in which Abelard, as a thirty-six-year-old lecturer, savours his...
politics Ella Wheeler Wilcox
EWW set out with conservative views on the Woman Question, though her early experience on a western farm meant that she took it for granted that women would be active and self-reliant. Her gender...

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