Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France

by Joan DeJean

This treatise argues that women writers were the originators of the modern novel in France. It uses the novels of Scudery and Lafayette to illustrate how such works undermined French tradition by suggesting that women had a right to choose their husbands and to lead independent lives.

297 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1991

About the author

Joan DeJean has been Trustee Professor at the University of Pennsylvania since 1988. She previously taught at Yale and at Princeton. She is the author of eleven books on French literature, history, and material culture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including most recently How Paris Became Paris: The Invention of the Modern City (2014); The Age of Comfort: When Paris Discovered Casual--and the Modern Home Began (2009); The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Food, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour (2005). She lives in Philadelphia and, when in Paris, around the corner from the house where, in 1612, this story began.