Madeleine: One of Love's Jansenists

Novel by Hope Mirrlees, about a seventeen-year-old girl named Madeleine Troqueville living in Paris in the middle of the seventeenth century, who aspires to become part of Mademoiselle de Scudéry's salon intimates.

The themes of this book can be linked to fan fiction and Mary Sue, and women and madness. There is also agreat deal of religious reflexion on the part of the protagonist, who devises a system of superstitions which she hopes will help her achieve her dreams.

Reviews

An anonymous (though presumably male) reviewer wrote in 1919:

As a first novel this is distinctly an achievement; the author has soaked herself in the history of Les Précieuses, and has reproduced the style and atmosphere of the Hôtel de Rambouillet with an almost hysterical fidelity. Indeed, so perfectly has she recaptured the state of mind and style of expression of the period that her book is likely to suffer the same fate as the works of the blue-stockings who inspired it : “Madeleine” is almost as unreadable as the romances of Mademoiselle de Scudéry herself. To a modern reader, Molière’s is the only satisfactory way to treat the period of Les Precieuses; and the author, although she realises with singular skill the affected moods of her heroine, nowhere challenges the values of Les Précieuses. She afflicts her heroine with awkwardness, instead of afflicting Mademoiselle de Scudéry with a little common sense. It is certainly a gift to be able to reproduce an historical period with such fidelity, but there are some passages of history that ought not to he allowed to repeat themselves ; and we should prefer something more personal from Miss Mirrlees.

(Count the tactics listed in How To Suppress Women's Writing that appear in the above!)