SOURCE: "Mme de Charrière: Travel and Uprooting," in Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol. XIII, No. 1, February, 1989, pp. 42-8.

In the essay below, Deguise traces the themes of travel and displacement—important literary devices for the epistolary novel—throughout Charrière's oeuvre.

The valuable introduction to the ten-volume edition of Isabelle de Charrière's Oeuvres complètes reveals that the author traveled more in reality and in spirit than had been previously thought. At the age of ten she spent several months in France and Geneva with her governess, Mlle Prévost. Many of the letters she wrote during her six-month stay in England in 1767 have long been available, and we know that she went to Paris several times, at one point remaining there for eighteen months. She spent more than half this time without her husband. For several subsequent years after her marriage, she returned home to Zuylen, and...