SOURCE: Wood, Diane S. “The Evolution of Hélisenne de Crenne's Persona.” Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures 45, no. 2 (summer 1991): 140-51.

In the following essay, Wood examines how de Crenne fashions her self-portrait in her novel and letters.

The innovative nature of france's first sentimental novel has been examined during the past few years in numerous doctoral dissertations and scholarly articles. The present study is concerned with the author's acquisition of writing techniques and traces how Hélisenne de Crenne creates her own persona in the reader's mind from a collage of elements. A multifaceted view of the author/character/narrator/letter writer evolves gradually during the course of her first two published volumes and becomes more complex as the author gains confidence in her craft. Her self-portrait is genre-specific and intertextual in nature. Contemporary criticism enables the modern reader to codify the different Hélisennes and...