SOURCE: Didier, Béatrice. “Mme Roland: History, Memoirs, and Autobiography.” In Women Writers in Pre-Revolutionary France: Strategies of Emancipation, edited by Colette H. Winn and Donna Kuizenga, pp. 363-72. New York: Garland Publishing, 1997.

In this essay, Didier examines how Roland's memoirs constitute both self-representation and a form of self-formation, particularly in the face of threats to her self—both her physical person and the coherence of her inner self—experienced in prison.

Mme Roland's [1754-1793] Mémoires interest us for many reasons. They present characteristics that one might find in the work of George Sand or Yourcenar—minimal paratext, the central role of parents, and a vivacious expression of feeling: three traits that express the subordination of the self to the interests of family lineage and its reassertion at the level of individual sensations, while acknowledging the importance of that self as it relates to history. The exceptional...