SOURCE: "'Quel Aimable et Cruel Petit Livre': Madame de Charrière's Mistriss Henley," in French Forum, Vol. XI, No. 3, September, 1986, pp. 289-99.

In the essay that follows, Laden discusses Mistriss Henley as an epistolary autobiography in which Charrière provides a detailed account of living in a male-dominated society.

The socio-literary issues surrounding the status of women writers in the 18th century come together in the epistolary works of Madame de Charrière.¹ Born in Holland, Mme de Charrière spent most of her life in Switzerland and wrote in French. Her literary reputation is as ambiguous as the nature of her literary form; she is well-known to literary historians because of her correspondence with various celebrities of the period (Constant d'Hermenches and James Boswell as well as Benjamin Constant), but apart from Caliste her works are seldom read in their own right.² Her life and personality, on...