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There Are No Letters Like Yours: The Correspondence of Isabelle de Charrière and Constant d'Hermenches (European Women Writers) - Softcover
Synopsis
The letters between a young Dutch woman and a Swiss soldier
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
Review
"It is only in the past decade . . . that Isabelle de Charriere's writings have been recognized as the remarkable resource they are: an indelibly fresh register of a whole period, as well as of one woman's exploration of 'how to be yourself without stepping out of the system.'"-Annette Kobak, Times Literary Supplement -- Annette Kobak * Times Literary Supplement *
Synopsis
Isabelle de Charriere (1740-1805) is best known for four of her novels: Lettres neuchateloises, Lettres de Mistriss Henley, Lettres ecrites de Lausanne, and Caliste. These finely drawn representations of provincial courtship, marriage, and domestic life have been called the closest thing in French to the novels of Jane Austen. A daughter of a distinguished Dutch noble family, she was known in her youth as Belle de Zuylen. At the age of twenty she began a clandestine correspondence with a middle-aged Swiss colonel stationed in Holland. David-Louis, Baron de Constant d'Hermenches, was a friend of Voltaire, an accomplished musician, an amateur writer, and a ladies' man. Their correspondence was one of the finest in a great age of letter-writing. It lasted fifteen years, and nearly all of it is extant. Although the two rarely saw each other, their epistolary friendship became one of great depth and scope. Their correspondence touches on a wide range of subjects: James Boswell's courtship of Isabelle, her opinions of English high society, the new smallpox inoculation, and visits by royalty.
It includes firsthand accounts of the French conquest of Corsica and of Voltaire's social activism. Readers acquainted with Charriere's novels will see in these letters the same finely observed detail, epistolary style, and moral and intellectual awareness. Janet and Malcolm Whatley live in Burlington, Vermont. Janet Whatley is a professor of French at the University of Vermont specializing in the literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries."About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherBison Books
- Publication date2002
- ISBN 10 0803264275
- ISBN 13 9780803264274
- BindingPaperback
- LanguageEnglish
- Number of pages551
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There are no letters like yours: the correspondence of Isabelle de Charriere and Constant d'Hermenches.
Seller: Kloof Booksellers & Scientia Verlag, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
Condition: as new. Lincoln, NE : University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Paperback. xxxv,549 pp. Condition : fine. - This animated, cultured correspondence begins almost like a romantic novel: high-born Dutch virgin, age 20, meets dashing older married man--a Swiss colonel with a reputation as a libertine--and they strike up a clandestine correspondence. Gossip alternates with deep thoughts and self-revelation in this 16-year epistolary friendship of Dutch novelist Isabelle de Charriere (1740-1805), whose novels (written in French) have been compared to those of Jane Austen, and David-Louis, baron de Constant d'Hermenches (1722-1785), amateur musician and actor, pamphleteer and poet, friend of Voltaire. Isabelle van Tuyll (the novelist's maiden name) writes bright, witty, lucid letters spiked with epigrammatic wit, which weave a cunning self-portrait of a passionate, intelligent woman who oscillates between self-assertive independence and doing what her family and associates expect of her. D'Hermenches's letters, which swing between self-dramatization, moralizing and worldly advice, reflect the extended midlife crisis of a man who feels trapped in the role of misanthropic Don Juan, growing estranged from his wife and tired of upper-class pretensions. When the scheming baron tries to marry off Isabelle to his friend, the four-year fiasco ends with her fleeing to London in 1767 for a half-year vacation; she later marries a placid Swiss country gentleman. D'Hermenches's transfer to Corsica, where he helps the French crush a revolt, prompts his self-justifying letters full of carnage and Isabelle's tart replies doubting the motives of colonialism. Condition : as new copy. ISBN 9780803264274. Keywords : LITERARY CRITICISM, Charrière, Isabel de (Belle van Zuylen) (1740-1805). Seller Inventory # 3433
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