SOURCE: "Courting Death: Roman, romantisme, and Mistress Henley 's Narrative Practices," in Eighteenth-Century Life, Vol XIII, No. 1, February, 1989, pp. 49-59.

In the following essay, Lanser discusses Mistriss Henley in relation to Samuel de Constant's novel of 1783, Le Mari sentimental, contrasting the triviality of Charrière's domestic detail with the larger questions of adultery and death found in Constant's work.

In 1972, when PMLA was still publishing in foreign languages, Janine Rossard's "Le Désir de mort romantique dans Caliste"¹ inaugurated on this side of the Atlantic what has become a steadily growing interest in Isabelle de Charrière. Rossard evoked that interest by associating Charrière with the ethos of early romanticism and particularly with the presence in Caliste—both the novel and the character—of a longing for death. The "désir de mort" in Caliste, Rossard implies, is a crystallization of Charrière's own pessimism, which cannot...