The correspondence of Madame de Sévigné, covering almost fifty years of a rich and turbulent period in French history and culture (1648-1696), has been the favorite reading of great writers from Voltaire to Virginia Woolf. From the time of their first publication in 1726, Sévigné's letters have provided a standard against which other important letter collections can be measured. Writing in an era when epistolary style was cultivated as an art, Sévigné's correspondence grew out of this tradition, but she transcended it with her original, personal, and creative approach to letter writing.

Marie de Rabutin Chantal was born in Paris on 5 February 1626, the only child of Marie de Coulanges and Celse-Bénigne de Rabutin, baron de Chantal. On her mother's side she descended from a wealthy bourgeois family, while her father was a titled nobleman from an...