SOURCE: Jensen, Katharine Ann. “Writing Out of the Double Bind: Female Plot and Hélisenne de Crenne's Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours.” Oeuvres & Critiques 19, no. 1 (1994): 61-67.

In the following essay, Jensen discusses the general assumption that Les Angoysses douloureuses is autobiographical, maintaining that this belief has obscured de Crenne's text.

In her “First Invective Letter,” published in 1539 in the collection Epistres familieres et invectives, Hélisenne de Crenne struggles to correct a misreading of her novel, Les Angoysses douloureuses qui procedent d'amours, published a year before in 1538. Addressing her husband who has read the novel's first-person narrative of adulterous love as evidence of his wife's infidelity, Crenne asserts herself as a writer, as a creator of fiction rather than a transcriber of personal fact:

Your heart's hasty judgment has led you to imagine that my Angoysses (which I had composed, in fact, only to pass the time...