SOURCE: "New Heroines: Countering Women's Fiction(s)," in Revealing Difference: The Fiction of Isabelle de Charrière, University of Delaware Press, 1995, pp. 19-39.

In the following essay, Allison compares Charrière 's work to other eighteenth-century fiction, noting that she not only condemns the existing stereotypes of women but also challenges the very force of stereotyping itself

The success of Lettres portugaises [The letters of a Portuguese nun] (1669), probably authored by Gabriel de Guilleragues (d. 1685), illustrates well the way in which representations of women can serve to perpetuate a stereotype of woman.¹ This brief, monophonic epistolary novel presents the letters of an abandoned Portuguese nun to the French officer who seduced her. So great was the appeal of the novel Lettres portugaises that the term "une portugaise" came to designate the standard abandoned-woman's passionate letter. That the title should be so readily adapted for current usage in seventeenth-century...