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Lettres d'une Peruvienne
One of the most popular works of the eighteenth century, Lettres d'une Péruvienne appeared in more than 130 editions, reprints, and translations during the hundred years following its publi cation in 1747. In the novel the Inca princess Zilia is kidnapped by Spanish conquerors, captured by the French after a battle at sea, and taken to Europe. Graffigny's brilliant novel offered a bold critique of French society, delivered one of the most vehement feminist protests in eighteenth-century literature, and announced―fourteen years before Rousseau's Julie, or the New Eloise ―the Romantic tradition in French literature.
168 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1747
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161 people want to read
About the author
Françoise de Graffigny
126 books6 followersFrançoise de Graffigny, née d'Issembourg Du Buisson d'Happoncourt (11 February 1695 - 12 December 1758), was a French novelist, playwright and salon hostess.
Initially famous as the author of Lettres d'une Péruvienne, a novel published in 1747, she became the world's best-known living woman writer after the success of her sentimental comedy, Cénie, in 1750. Her reputation as a dramatist suffered when her second play at the Comédie-Française, La Fille d'Aristide, was a flop in 1758, and even her novel fell out of favor after 1830. From then until the last third of the twentieth century, she was almost forgotten, but thanks to new scholarship and the interest in women writers generated by the feminist movement, Françoise de Graffigny is now regarded as one of the major French writers of the eighteenth century.
Initially famous as the author of Lettres d'une Péruvienne, a novel published in 1747, she became the world's best-known living woman writer after the success of her sentimental comedy, Cénie, in 1750. Her reputation as a dramatist suffered when her second play at the Comédie-Française, La Fille d'Aristide, was a flop in 1758, and even her novel fell out of favor after 1830. From then until the last third of the twentieth century, she was almost forgotten, but thanks to new scholarship and the interest in women writers generated by the feminist movement, Françoise de Graffigny is now regarded as one of the major French writers of the eighteenth century.
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
December 18, 2019
J'ai appris en consultant les pages de Goodreads que les anglophones ont découvert la vocation pédagogique de ce petit chef-d'oeuvre. La plupart des critiques sont des jeunes lectrices qui ont avoué qu'elles l'ont lu parce qu'il était au programme d'un cours universitaire. Ce roman plaît difficilement à une lectrice ou à un lecteur moderne qui le lit en dehors du miliue scolaire mais il a le potential d'enseigner beaucoup à un étudiant de la littérature.
D'abord Les lettres d'une péruvienne fournit un bel example du roman d'amour francais qui a commencé avec La princesse de Clèves. Aussi, c'est une excellente introduction au roman épistolaire. Finallement, Les lettres d'une péruvienne traite de façon magistrale les mêmes thèmes que les Lettres persannes de Montesquieu ou de l'Ingénu de Voltaire. À mon avis le roman de Graffigny est presqu'aussi bon que celui de Montesquieu et supérieur de loin à celui de Voltaire.
Dans les trois romans un protagoniste originaire d'un pays exotique est plongé dans le monde de la haute nobelesse française du dix-huitième siècle. Le parcours du protagoniste met en lumière l'arbitraire de conventions culturelles et l'hypocrisie des gens en société. Parmi les trois romans, Les lettres péruviennes est la seule qui aborde la question du point de vue féminine. Les lettres péruviennes est unique aussi dans le sens qu'il montre une progression d'un stage initiale où il y a malentendus qui arrivent parce que le protagonist ne comprend pas bien le français à un stage ultime où l'héroine ayant maitrisé le francais reste en opposition profronde avec quelques aspect de la culture française.
Ce roman est vraiment excellent mais ses plaisirs seront minces si on ne le lit pas pour un cours. C'est un roman qui provoquera des discussions vives dans une salle de classe. Lire les lettres persannes dans un autre contexte sera plutôt une corvée.
D'abord Les lettres d'une péruvienne fournit un bel example du roman d'amour francais qui a commencé avec La princesse de Clèves. Aussi, c'est une excellente introduction au roman épistolaire. Finallement, Les lettres d'une péruvienne traite de façon magistrale les mêmes thèmes que les Lettres persannes de Montesquieu ou de l'Ingénu de Voltaire. À mon avis le roman de Graffigny est presqu'aussi bon que celui de Montesquieu et supérieur de loin à celui de Voltaire.
Dans les trois romans un protagoniste originaire d'un pays exotique est plongé dans le monde de la haute nobelesse française du dix-huitième siècle. Le parcours du protagoniste met en lumière l'arbitraire de conventions culturelles et l'hypocrisie des gens en société. Parmi les trois romans, Les lettres péruviennes est la seule qui aborde la question du point de vue féminine. Les lettres péruviennes est unique aussi dans le sens qu'il montre une progression d'un stage initiale où il y a malentendus qui arrivent parce que le protagonist ne comprend pas bien le français à un stage ultime où l'héroine ayant maitrisé le francais reste en opposition profronde avec quelques aspect de la culture française.
Ce roman est vraiment excellent mais ses plaisirs seront minces si on ne le lit pas pour un cours. C'est un roman qui provoquera des discussions vives dans une salle de classe. Lire les lettres persannes dans un autre contexte sera plutôt une corvée.
August 11, 2020
Françoise de Graffigny était vraiment en avance sur son temps parce qu'elle explique le sexisme et la culture française avec une clarté moderne dans ce livre. Puisque le français n'est pas ma langue maternelle, il y avait quelques moments où je ne comprenais pas chaque mot du texte, mais je crois encore qu'il serait un bon livre pour un cours de littérature française. Il traite des thèmes de genre, culture, isolement, et la quête de soi, donc on pourrait écrire une bonne rédaction sur un de ces thèmes pour un cours à cause de la richesse du travail de Françoise de Graffigny. Je ne regrette qu'il a pris tellement de mon temps, car j'avais d'autres choses de lire cet été!
February 19, 2015
Reading this book in English is boring. Reading it in French is boring AND difficult as a student. This is the worst reading I've ever been assigned. I don't give a crap about Zilia and her pathetic life, nor do I care for her mooning over Aza at the start of every damn letter. Never waste your time on this unless you have to, in which case, I feel for you.
April 11, 2025
read for french class and it was better than i expected! i liked the ending and the social critique and also getting to read something not by a man!
February 18, 2025
Zilia my feminist icon
April 3, 2025
Aza, tu es de putain de cochon!!!!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 22, 2013
Graffigny’s Letters from a Peruvian Women Unhappy Happy Ending
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be kidnapped and be taken to a different country and be taken from your only love? Being kidnapped would be a scary situation but getting taken to a place where they don’t speak the same language and the culture is the complete opposite of yours would be even scarier. As a woman who was taken from her homeland, Zilia (the main character in the book) finds a way to talk to her future husband, Aza. She also learns to adapt to her new surroundings. In, Letters from a Peruvian Woman, Graffigny gives us an example of what it would be like to be kidnapped and taken to some place you have never been to in this classic historical fiction French literature novel.
Zilia, an Inca princess, is kidnapped by the Spaniards. She is taken from her homeland and future husband, Aza. Zilia wants to get back home to Peru but can’t because she is held hostage. In these letters to Aza, she explains the torments she endures, getting captures by the French after a battle at sea and the arrival to the European continent. During her voyage she gets kindness from the ships commander, Deterville. He also calms her and teaches her the French language and culture. She struggles to adapt to her new culture and to keep her old one. When she arrives to Paris she finds out that Deterville has fallen in love with her. So Zilia hopes that Deterville will help her find a way home back to her star-crossed lover Aza. Will she stay faithful to Aza? Will Aza stay faithful to her? Most importantly, will she find a way home? An example of when they might not seem so star-crossed is when Zilia says “You are unaware of what I am suffering, you do not even know if I exist, if I love you. Aza, dearest Aza, will you ever know?” (103) because she is doubting him.
Because of the adventurous love story and the difficultness of the text, Graffigny’s book is recommended to those who are up for a good love triangle story and those who are up for the challenge of understanding the text itself. I rate this book 4 stars out of five because this book was a page turner but it was challenging to read due to the fact it wasn’t written in our time.
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to be kidnapped and be taken to a different country and be taken from your only love? Being kidnapped would be a scary situation but getting taken to a place where they don’t speak the same language and the culture is the complete opposite of yours would be even scarier. As a woman who was taken from her homeland, Zilia (the main character in the book) finds a way to talk to her future husband, Aza. She also learns to adapt to her new surroundings. In, Letters from a Peruvian Woman, Graffigny gives us an example of what it would be like to be kidnapped and taken to some place you have never been to in this classic historical fiction French literature novel.
Zilia, an Inca princess, is kidnapped by the Spaniards. She is taken from her homeland and future husband, Aza. Zilia wants to get back home to Peru but can’t because she is held hostage. In these letters to Aza, she explains the torments she endures, getting captures by the French after a battle at sea and the arrival to the European continent. During her voyage she gets kindness from the ships commander, Deterville. He also calms her and teaches her the French language and culture. She struggles to adapt to her new culture and to keep her old one. When she arrives to Paris she finds out that Deterville has fallen in love with her. So Zilia hopes that Deterville will help her find a way home back to her star-crossed lover Aza. Will she stay faithful to Aza? Will Aza stay faithful to her? Most importantly, will she find a way home? An example of when they might not seem so star-crossed is when Zilia says “You are unaware of what I am suffering, you do not even know if I exist, if I love you. Aza, dearest Aza, will you ever know?” (103) because she is doubting him.
Because of the adventurous love story and the difficultness of the text, Graffigny’s book is recommended to those who are up for a good love triangle story and those who are up for the challenge of understanding the text itself. I rate this book 4 stars out of five because this book was a page turner but it was challenging to read due to the fact it wasn’t written in our time.
September 13, 2015
I really enjoyed this book. This 18th century epistolary novel follows the journey of Zilia, a Peruvian princess, from her abduction by Spaniards to her eventual life in France, learning a new language and new culture. The majority of the novel consists of letters to her fiancé Aza, from whom she had been separated, and the last few letters are to her friend Déterville, her French host who takes a love interest in her. The simplistic style of the novel makes it both easy to read and brings out a critique of what the author, through Zilia's voice, perceives to be the taken-for-granted aspects of French culture: hypocrisy, pretense, and gender inequality.
October 5, 2022
(writing a term paper on this fyi)
The novel itself is, I think, fairly innovative at the level of form, having crafted a fairly exciting epistolary chain of transmission between its protagonist, Zilia, the stolen Incan princess, and an imagined epistolary discourse of her lover, Aza. Graffigny, it should be said, never finished the text, and so the ending it currently possesses is all the more rife with multiple meanings, each of which disclose a different kind of turn on the novel's late-stage revelation (spoiler: Aza converts to Catholicism, making him repulsed, I guess, at the idea of marrying his sister). This last idea strikes me as unresolved - that, in the idealized (and exoticized) vision of Incan life from which Graffigny works, love is rooted in similitude; the very notion that Aza and Zilia share a familial bond is all the more proof as to the righteousness of their hypothetical union, one that Aza cannot help but to break. I can't help but think, however, that this conclusion is not the one that we would have ended up with had Graffigny finished the text. The idea that similitude in love (as distinct from "l'amitié, which can attach to many people, like that of the steadfast-if-vapid Déterville) is some kind of moral virtue seems incongruous with the incisive takedown of the moral hypocrasy of French royal society elsewhere in the novel. They are, after all, Z and A, or A and Z ; both ends of a spectrum of language, with Z having narrative control over how it is that this autoerotographic text unspools itself over a somehow long 168 pages. Would Graffigny - inhabiting and speaking through, in some sense, the subaltern - have found no room to probe Zilia's own shortcomings and lacunae, the own flaws of her diagnosis of French emotional life? Perhaps a question best left to the professionals.
Anyway, superlatively good otherwise - prehends the Romantic novel in a number of respects, and the fact that Graffigny (this is what I'll write more about, ,en francais, bien sur) wrote such a text having written such a compendium of letters herself speaks to the composition and form of this wonderful novel. English translations both cheap and delightful.
The novel itself is, I think, fairly innovative at the level of form, having crafted a fairly exciting epistolary chain of transmission between its protagonist, Zilia, the stolen Incan princess, and an imagined epistolary discourse of her lover, Aza. Graffigny, it should be said, never finished the text, and so the ending it currently possesses is all the more rife with multiple meanings, each of which disclose a different kind of turn on the novel's late-stage revelation (spoiler: Aza converts to Catholicism, making him repulsed, I guess, at the idea of marrying his sister). This last idea strikes me as unresolved - that, in the idealized (and exoticized) vision of Incan life from which Graffigny works, love is rooted in similitude; the very notion that Aza and Zilia share a familial bond is all the more proof as to the righteousness of their hypothetical union, one that Aza cannot help but to break. I can't help but think, however, that this conclusion is not the one that we would have ended up with had Graffigny finished the text. The idea that similitude in love (as distinct from "l'amitié, which can attach to many people, like that of the steadfast-if-vapid Déterville) is some kind of moral virtue seems incongruous with the incisive takedown of the moral hypocrasy of French royal society elsewhere in the novel. They are, after all, Z and A, or A and Z ; both ends of a spectrum of language, with Z having narrative control over how it is that this autoerotographic text unspools itself over a somehow long 168 pages. Would Graffigny - inhabiting and speaking through, in some sense, the subaltern - have found no room to probe Zilia's own shortcomings and lacunae, the own flaws of her diagnosis of French emotional life? Perhaps a question best left to the professionals.
Anyway, superlatively good otherwise - prehends the Romantic novel in a number of respects, and the fact that Graffigny (this is what I'll write more about, ,en francais, bien sur) wrote such a text having written such a compendium of letters herself speaks to the composition and form of this wonderful novel. English translations both cheap and delightful.
April 29, 2019
frankly boring
April 22, 2024
Zilia is genuinely an icon
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February 16, 2025the parallels between this and paddington in peru go crazy
April 1, 2025
C'était un livre intéressant d'un point de vue qu'on ne peut avoir de nos jours. Par contre ça feel comme une weird romance j'ai pas aimé cette partie.
October 13, 2025
nique le bac
December 21, 2022
Read this for class and really enjoyed it. It was a little hard to understand, but a very interesting and insightful book. I liked the emphasis on women’s importance and role in society.
August 7, 2011
If I weren't a Romantic, I might have liked the ending...story line is otherwise good and makes for a captivating and quick read.
May 23, 2012
I read this for senior seminar in college and am re-reading it for a book group.
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February 24, 2025Reread for class
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews