The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782

by Nancy K. Miller

The Heroine's Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782 [hardcover] Miller, Nancy K. [Jul 01, 1980] …

185 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1980

About the author

Nancy K. Miller is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, most recently What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past, winner of the Jewish Journal Prize for 2012, and the story of a quest to recreate her family’s lost history. A well-known feminist scholar, Miller has published family memoirs, personal essays, and literary criticism. She is a Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she teaches classes in memoir, graphic novel, and women’s studies.

Miller lectures widely, both nationally and internationally, and her work is anthologized in popular volumes on autobiography and collections of feminist essays. She also co-edits the Gender and Culture series at Columbia University Press, which she co-founded in 1983 with the late Carolyn Heilbrun.

After graduating from Barnard College, Miller sailed to Paris to study French literature and complete a master’s degree. Already in love with the city from movies and novels, she hoped to create a new, more sophisticated identity for her twenty-year-old, nice New York-Jewish-girl self. Several years of adventures and misadventures later, including marriage to an American ex-pat, Miller returned to New York minus the husband but ready to reinvent herself as an academic and writer.

Her new book (forthcoming from Seal, Fall 2013) describes that odyssey.

Reviews

[Grace Harwood · Rating 2 out of 5]

Having read some wonderful critical pieces by this author, I was a bit disappointed in this. My disappointment, I think, stems from the age of the criticism (it's quite old - published in 1980; so more to do with when I've read it rather than any fault of the author) and also the fact that the author herself admits that she has not done a comprehensive job in looking at the Text's Heroine of 18th century literature. As she correctly points out, "...in the eighteenth-century women writers were not the marginal figures they have become in the annals of literary history. They were active participants in the production and dissemination of the novel: they were not only its readers, they wrote best sellers." (p. 155) and yet none of these female novelists are examined here. The author herself states that this will be the second stage of this project (although I'm not sure if this ever emerged in print). An analysis of fiction by women of this era reveals, in my opinion, a very different "Text's Heroine" and one which would have complimented the criticism in this book nicely. A reading of Charlotte Smith's translation of Manon Lescaut alongside the Abbe Prevost novel, for example, would have been a useful exercise and I'm not quite sure why Smith's translation is completely overlooked.

Miller writes really well, and I've had some real serendipity moments whilst reading her work, which have informed my own research. However, I felt this was a bit disappointing (personally).