Christine de Pizan is truly the first professional women writer in the history of French literature. She produced an extremely diverse body of texts, ranging from courtly poetry to political treatises. Her oeuvre is quite extensive and she experienced relative fame during her lifetime as a writer.
Christine’s life is known to us primarily because she wrote about herself in several of her works. She did so especially to justify her position as a woman writer, exceptional at the beginning of the fifteen century. Having grown up at the court of Charles V where her father was called to work as a physician, Christine was married at fifteen and had three children. Ten years after her marriage, she lost both her husband and her father, finding herself in the difficult position of having to support her children and her mother. What’s more, as Christine tells us, she had to defend her rights to inheritance in court in a number of cases that apparently went on for years.
Her first poems date from this period of personal turmoil and they express with intensity her pain at the lost happiness of her former life. She wrote several volumes of poems while at the same time working to supplement her education, which was already exceptional for a woman at this time. She writes of moving from poetry to the study of history and philosophy, more serious undertakings. With her participation in the "Débat sur le Roman de la Rose," in which she criticizes Jean de Meun for the representation of women in his allegory, Christine found her political voice and took up moral and political themes in her writing, first in verse and later in prose. She composed most of her writings between 1400 and 1413.(MS)
Pernette Du Guillet was part of the Lyonnais school of poetry which flourished in mid sixteenth-century Lyon. She died at the young age of 25 and left behind a collection of poems which her husband subsequently had published. She was probably of the nobility; she was well-educated in Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek and exceptionally skilled in music if one is to believe her editor, Antoine Du Moulin, who praises her skills in his introduction to her Rymes. He also recognizes the unusually open literary climate of Lyon which nurtured the arts for both women and men through collaborative activity in informal social gatherings.
Du Guillet poetic life was much influenced by her relationship with Maurice Scève. She is widely believed to be the inspiration for his Délie. They entered into a poetic dialogue which came out of the Neoplatonic idea of amytié in which the two lovers strive towards their ideal selves through the other. It is a spiritual relationship of mutual benefit. The ideal of amytié is most central to Du Guillet's poetry. She worked in many different forms, however, proving her linguistic virtuosity. Du Guillet refers to Scève as her mentor, putting herself in the place of the student. She expresses in her poetry a strong desire to create herself as a poet in the image of her mentor and an ambition to acquire the public recognition associated with ideal love and poetic virtuosity.(MS)
During her long life, Marie de Gournay produced an impressive body of writings in subject areas spanning from poetic treatises to political pamphlets to a novel. She was born in Paris and settled there again after 22 years of her youth spent at the family's estate in Picardy where her mother had moved the family upon her father's death. Although she laments the lack of guidance she had in her education during her youth, she pursued actively any education she could, teaching herself Latin, for example, by comparing the original text to its French translation. She even managed to find someone to teach her Greek.
A turning point in her life took place around 1580 when she read Montaigne's Essais. She was profoundly touched by this work and actively sought to meet its author. In 1588 she did at last meet him during a trip to Paris. Shortly after, he asked her to be his "fille d'alliance," a term often translated as "adopted daughter." It connotes, however, a relationship of the mind between equals. Montaigne considered her thus and spent a great deal of the following year at the estate, Gournay-sur-Aronde, discussing his work with her. Her first published work is presented as a product of their exchange, Le Proumenoir de Monsieur de Montaigne (1594). It includes a novel, followed by poems and passages translated from the Aeneid. After his death in 1592, Marie de Gournay became the principal editor of the Essais, writing the preface to the 1595 edition and editing the 1598 and the 1641 editions.
The 1599 move to Paris opened up a new chapter in her life. She started frequenting the salon of Marguerite de Valois where she met a number of influential court characters and eventual benefactors. She seems to have been perpetually involved in controversy and the victim of much ridicule at court for her outspoken stance on several issues: She actively advocated education for women which equals that of men; and she critisized the current poetic theory prefering instead that of the Pléiade which was, in her opinion, much less constrictive. Her first autobiographical work was the result of a prank. She was told that James I of England wanted a biographical sketch of her for a collection of texts on famous men and women of the time and only found out about the trick after having sent her contribution. She included what she wrote in a later edition of her complete works, Les Advis ou les Presens de la Demoiselle de Gournay, adding a Peincture de moeurs (1641). Thus she appropriates a text which was meant to ridicule her and makes it into a statement of who she is -- a women writer. Critisized for anti-classical tastes during her life time, for being old-fashioned, Marie de Gournay appears now, rather, to have been ahead of her time in her struggle to voice the woes of dependence on others women are condemned to and to advocate the liberty which can be had for women through education. The texts reproduced here, Egalité des hommes et des femmes (1622) and Grief des dames (1626) demonstrate this most strongly.(MS)
Little is known about the details of the life of Louise Labé. Much has been made, however, in the history of French literature about the personality of the woman revealed in her poetry. This conflation of the author and the female narrator of the Oeuvres of Louise Labé has lead to a mythic portrait of "La Belle Cordière," as Labé was known to her contemporaries. Her public literary presence earned her less flattering epithets; Calvin referred once to her as a "plebeia meretrix."
Louise Labé was probably born between 1515 and 1524 near Lyon where her father was a rope manufacturer. She was educated according to the humanist ideals of the period, studying Latin, Italian, music, letters and even the practice of arms. She was an accomplished musician and the writing of sonnets would have been a typical pastime in the cultural capital of France that Lyon had become in the first half of the sixteenth century. Lyon was a vibrant metropolis at this time; very much influenced by Italian culture, and situated on all the major trade routes in Europe, it was a center of banking and trade. A haven for Renaissance thinkers who were looking to escape the authority of the Sorbonne in Paris, Lyon was also an extremely important publishing center.
Around 1543, Labé married Ennemond Perrin, a rope maker like her father. It was during this period that Labé was associated with notable literary figures of the Lyon school, including Maurice Scève, Pernette Du Guillet, Olivier de Magny, and Pontus de Tyard.
The Oeuvres of Louise Labé were published in 1555 by Jean de Tournes. This first edition was followed by three others a year later, which attest to its immediate popularity. All her writings are contained in the one volume which is prefaced by a dedicatory letter to Clémence de Bourges, a young Lyonnaise noblewoman. This letter, an important early feminist treatise which calls women to the act of writing, is followed by a prose debate between Cupid and Folly, three elegies and twenty-four sonnets. The first edition was also accompanied by a series of poems in praise of the author written by many of her fellow poets. In this careful construction of her public figure which accompanies the only written works by Louise Labé known to us, the reader finds the mythical figure the author undoubtedly wished to present.(MS)
Marguerite de Navarre was born into the Angoulême family and spent her youth first in Cognac and then in the Loire valley at the Blois and Amboise châteaux. She was educated in Latin, Italian, Spanish, Philosophy and Scripture. Her brother, Francis I, inherited the throne in 1515 and Marguerite, who would be close to him throughout her life, joined him in the very public life of the royal court. She was heavily involved in court politics. Her influence was most strongly demonstrated after the defeat of Francis I at Pavia where he was taken hostage by Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor. It was Marguerite who went to Spain and negotiated his release.
Through the influence of two of the most prominent Evangelists of the time, Guillaume Briçonnet and Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples, Marguerite developed strong sympathies for reformist ideas and became a protector for several important reformist figures. She was not immune herself, however, to the dangers of this movement. One of her many spiritual writings, Le Miroir de l'ame pecheresse, was condemned by the Sorbonne when it was published in 1531.
Her first marriage to Charles, duke of Alençon, ended in 1525 with his death and, in 1527, she married Henri d'Albret, king of Navarre. They had one child who survived, Jeanne d'Albret, the mother of Henri IV.
Marguerite is best known as the author of the Heptaméron, a series of framed tales modeled after Boccaccio's Decameron. Marguerite's innovation in the genre was to expand significantly the frame of the novella, deepening the perspective of the genre and opening up more room for multiple levels of meaning. She also produced an extensive corpus of spiritual writings which remain a highly personal expression.(MS)
Diane de Poitiers epitomizes the figure of female power in the circles of the aristocracy in sixteenth-century France. She is best known as the mistress of Henry II and her influence on court politics during his reign is legendary. Her skill as a horsewoman and huntress lead to the obvious comparison with the goddess Diane whose myth she skillfully used to distinguish herself at court and in the eyes of Henry II.
Diane de Poitiers was born in 1500. At the age of ten she was placed at the court of Anne de France where many girls of noble families were educated. According to humanist ideals, the girls were taught Latin and courtly behavior. The court school of Anne de France is known especially for its emphasis on piety but prepared its students well in court politics. The girls read the church fathers but were also instructed in diplomatic strategy and the practical virtue of strength of character. Married at 15 to a man of fifty-six and widowed six years later, Diane chose, as did many court women of her situation, not to remarry. She was and remained a wealthy woman and in her later years, after the death of Henry II, she used her resources to fund a hospital near her estate, to train midwives, to establish a home for unwed mothers, supplying these women with significant dowries.
Besides over one hundred extent letters, Diane left two poems to posterity. The letters are written for a diversity of occasions, public and private. Some are written in the king’s name, others are cowritten by Diane and Henry. Her personal letters often focus in on public concerns and her letters about her private affairs were the subject of public discussion in her lifetime. The public and the private are thus blurred in her writings which give a glimpse of the personality of one of the most public of people of the French Renaissance.(MS)
Madeleine de Scudéry was born in 1607. She was orphaned young and raised by an uncle who educated her, according to the standards of the time, in writing, drawing, dancing, and painting. At the age of thirty she went to Paris to live with her brother who introduced her to the important social and literary circles of the time, including the salon at the Hôtel de Rambouillet.
Scudéry's first work appeared four years after her arrival in Paris. She published it, along with many of her other works, under her brother's name. It is evident, however, that her authorship was well known and she talked freely about it in her letters. This paradox points to the complicated rules of propriety and appearance in the courtly society of seventeenth century France. Scudéry's popularity was such that she eventually opened her own salon, the Samedi. Her salon had a reputation which attracted to it members of the Académie française and she was, in fact, the only woman to be acknowledged by the Académie in the seventeenth century. She was one of two women in the seventeenth century to receive a royal pension and in 1684 she was elected to the Academia dei Ricovrati of Padua.(MS)
One of the most flamboyant women of the seventeenth century, Ninon de Lenclos exercised an extraordinary degree of freedom for her time. Through her wit and sexual frankness, this celebrated courtesan rose to a position of influence and renown, extolling her right to act as an honnête homme.
Ninon's willingness to overstep social mores doubtless stemmed from the libertinism she imbued from her father. He also gave her a strong education in music, and Mlle de Lenclos was well known as a virtuoso on the lute. Coming from a background of little prominence, she soon gained influence among some of the Grand Siècle's most powerful men. Mindful of her liberty, Ninon maintained only short-term relations with these individuals, whom she classed as either a "payeur", a "martyr", or a "favorite".
Though castigated by some, Ninon nonetheless won the favor of most who knew her. A close friend of intellectuals such as Saint-Evremond, Molière, and Scarron, Mlle de Lenclos was an active philosopher in the skeptical and Epicurean movements of the time. She maintained a salon and undertook the amorous education of numerous young men, stressing the importance of refinement and good sense in sexual comportment.
Despite her evident intelligence, Ninon de Lenclos wrote little, of which even less survives. Her work includes an assortment of correspondance, noteworthy for its clear, straightforward style, as well as a short riposte entitled La Coquette Vengée, written as a response to Félix de Juvenel's unflattering Portrait de la Coquette. In the eighteenth century, Ninon's legendary status prompted the publication of spurious letters under her name. One such publication, Lettres de Ninon de Lenclos, by Louis D'Amours, is available here on the Early Modern French Women Writers website.(MM)
Works Consulted:
The Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature. Ed. Eva Sartori. Westport, Connecticut: 1999.