"French Connections: Seventeenth-century English Women’s Writing and Préciosité”

Résumé En

This chapter argues that an engagement with French literature and culture helped earlymodern English women from the middle and upper echelons transcend the limitationsimposed on their gender, and empowered them as readers, patrons, book owners, andsocial movers, but also translators and authors. As Tina Krontiris has argued, translationoften allowed early modern women an oblique and ‘soft’ point of entry into literature:‘Englishwomen responded in many ways to the obstacles they encountered . . .Translation became a popular form of literary expression among women of the period,especially in the acceptable subject of religion’.10 But women authors also looked towardsFrench literature as sources of inspiration, not just as new material to be tapped,but because it provided them with powerful philogynist models that valorised femaleagency. Seventeenth- century French society was traversed by a sweeping movementthat saw the emergence of the powerful female salon- holder, arbiter of mores and wit (and sometimes author) in her own right. This woman- friendly context was conduciveto the assertion of the published woman author. This chapter touches on the influenceon English women of the multifaceted movement subsumed in the concept of préciosité,a cultural phenomenon which created a unique stimulation for seventeenth- centuryFrench women by allowing them a voice on the social and the literary stages.