SOURCE: Cottrell, Robert D. “Female Subjectivity and Libidinal Infractions: Hélisenne de Crenne's Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours.” French Forum 16, no. 1 (January 1991): 5-19.

In the following essay, Cottrell examines the issues of female authorship and female readership in Les Angoysses douloureuses, focusing on the problem of female subjectivity as it relates to the female narrator and to the text itself.

Several claims have been made for Hélisenne de Crenne's novel Les Angoisses douloureuses qui procèdent d'amours, published in 1538 and reprinted at least eight times by 1560. Gustave Reynier, whose 1908 study on Le Roman sentimental avant l'Astrée renewed interest in Les Angoisses, called de Crenne's text the first “roman sentimental” in French literature.¹ Agreeing with Reynier, later scholars have maintained that it is also, as Fritz Neubert puts it, “the first original French novel of modern times,”² and, further, that it is France's first autobiographical novel...