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INTRODUCTION

Th e Chawton House Library: Women’s Novels series includes several translations from the French. Like my Translations and Continuations (2011),1 this 1803 trans-lation of Sophie Cottin’s Malvina (1801) by Elizabeth Gunning off ers an example of an English translation by a woman of a female-authored French novel, and as such it is also ‘partaking in the relatively recent trend within academia to recuper-ate from silence the voices of forgotten women writers and trace the networks among them’ (ix). Yet, with this being the fi rst nineteenth-century translation in the series, it speaks more broadly to issues of globalization in the Enlightenment literary marketplace, women’s contributions to it, female networks within it and the role played by gender in both its process and product. Th us, while Cottin wrote Malvina in an eff ort to atone for the proto-feminist overtones of her previ-ous novel, Gunning in fact restored such undercurrents to her translation while simultaneously striving to defend female virtue more forcefully.

Sophie Cottin (1770–1807) was born in Bordeaux into the wealthy bour-geois and Protestant Risteau family. Without any brothers and only one older sister who died in 1785 at age 17, Sophie received a sound education. At age nine-teen, she married Paul Cottin, a banker seven years her senior – but did not get to enjoy for very long what appears to have been a loving marriage due to the French Revolution. In order to escape the revolutionary turmoil, the newlyweds soon fl ed to the Pyrenees, Spain and England, but eventually returned to Paris. Paul would have been arrested there in October 1793, but died just beforehand. Although a heart attack was blamed for his early demise, suicide has been suggested more recently.2 Widowed Sophie abandoned the capital and moved to a family country estate in Champlan accompanied by her cousin Julie, with whom she had a very close relationship and to whose three daughters she became a substitute mother. Sophie suff ered during the Revolution, lost her fortune and even appeared on the liste des émigrés (list of emigrants) for some time as a ‘Republican traitor’. She turned down several marriage proposals, which in one case provoked a suicide on her suitor’s part, but never remarried. In 1804–5 she came close to remarrying with Pierre Hyacinthe Azaïs, a pretentious philosopher, but he rejected her aft er she told him she could not bear children.3 Faith always played an important role

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in Cottin’s life. She was a talented and prolifi c correspondent4 to friends, fam-ily members and Enlightenment luminaries – such as Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Germaine de Staël and Joseph Lalande – and in 1806 she wrote some beautiful descriptions of Italy during a trip with an ailing relative.5 Several months aft er her return, she died very prematurely of breast cancer at age thirty-seven.6

In order to assist a friend in fi nancial need, Cottin published her fi rst novel, Claire d’Albe, in 1799. Subsequently, four more novels appeared in short succes-sion: Malvina (1801), Amélie Mansfi eld (1802), Mathilde (1805) and Elisabeth (1806). Additionally, the best-selling novelist wrote a Bible-inspired text enti-tled La Prise de Jéricho (Th e Fall of Jericho; 1803). Claire d’Albe (published anonymously) proved both the most controversial for contemporary audiences and the most feminist to modern critics, with J. H. Stewart calling the hero-ine’s death ‘an attack on the ideology of fatherhood and phallus’.7 In short, at age twenty-two the heroine Claire has been in an arranged marriage8 for seven years with a respectable man forty years her senior with whom she has two children. When her husband’s nineteen-year-old male relative comes to stay with them, Claire and he fall in love. Th e husband separates them, they suff er, but eventually reunite on the tomb of Claire’s father (who had arranged the marriage), where they consummate their relationship. Claire dies the following day. Although the novel was quite successful, contemporaries criticised its ‘revolting immorality’ and later called it ‘one of Cottin’s most objectionable works’.9

Cottin’s other novels did not create as much of a stir. In Amélie Mansfi eld, a young disillusioned widow agrees to move in with an older male relative and become his heir. Her grandfather had promised his title and wealth to Amélie’s cousin if he married her, but she had then eloped. However, the cousin and Amélie meet, fall in love and agree to marry despite his mother’s opposition. Th ey consummate their relationship, his mother dissuades him from marrying Amélie, Amélie dies and he follows her. Mathilde, the fi rst novel not to be published anonymously, features the sixteen-year-old sister of Richard the Lionheart who travels with him to the Holy Land before becoming a nun. Th ere she meets a Saracen warrior and they fall in love. Despite her brother’s opposition, Mathilde is joined with her just-converted love, who then dies from battle wounds. Still a virgin, Mathilde enters the convent. Elisa-beth, based on a true story, takes place in Siberia where seventeen-year-old Elisabeth lives with her parents, who are political exiles. During a long voyage undertaken to ask the tsar for their freedom, she meets a young man and they fall in love. Elisabeth succeeds in freeing her parents and Cottin hints at a happy ending with her love interest. Th is fi nal novel enjoyed a very positive reception.

From the novel titles we can deduce their feminocentricity, a preference typical of the French nineteenth-century sentimental novel genre to which Cot-tin’s work belongs10 and which became popular among women writers aft er the Revolution as it allowed them to politicize their male-attributed greater capacity

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for feelings.11 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose epistolary novel Julie ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761) can be considered the earliest example of the genre in France, exerted a profound infl uence on Cottin. Rather than following Rousseau’s ide-als blindly though, Cottin rewrote them, both in her work and in her private life;12 just like him, she is considered a pre-Romantic.13 Whereas she contin-ued the tradition of Richardson and earlier women writers such as Riccoboni and Graffi gny, Cottin leads readers more commonly from their happy endings towards thwarted romantic love, death and tragic maternal love (like Julie).

Cottin’s novels sold very well and were greatly beloved by many contempo-raries in France and abroad, including Napoleon. Not everyone shared in this enthusiasm, however: Madame de Genlis (1746–1830), for instance, accused Cottin of having plagiarized her Voeux téméraires (Rash Vows; 1798) in Malvina.14 Later in the nineteenth century, Cottin’s work became gradually less popular,15 although Victor Hugo called her ‘the most accomplished novelist of her time’16 and Marceline Desbordes-Valmore wrote an admiring poem about her.17 Femi-nist scholars started to recuperate her voice from silence in the late twentieth century18 and since then, interest in Cottin’s work has soared although it still does not rival scholarly interest in her colleagues Riccoboni, Graffi gny and Char-rière. In 1996 Raymond Trousson published a modern French edition of Claire d’Albe in Europe, which facilitated easier access for modern readers; in 2002 the American Modern Language Association published the novel in both French and English. Several doctoral dissertations devoted to the author have also appeared, thus consolidating the future of Cottin scholarship on both continents.

From Cottin’s correspondence published by Sykes we know that a fi rst draft of Malvina was ready as early as 7 January 1799,19 but that the author did not sell her manuscript to Maradan for 1,200 livres until 5 September 1800.20 Th en, in a letter from the publisher to Cottin dated 7 January 1801 he states that the novel is not ready yet but will be soon; it did indeed appear later that month.21

French reviews of Malvina, although not extremely negative, expressed some criticism. Th us the Mercure de France claimed that Malvina’s topic was not new even though Cottin had added some new elements (p. 331) and reproached the novel for having ‘a little aff ectation and much ambition’ (p. 333). Nevertheless, from Cottin’s correspondence we know that Malvina sold so well that a mere fi ve months later by 5 June 1801, Maradan had already prepared a second edition without changes or cor-rections.22 In 1805 there followed a second revised and corrected edition published in Paris by Michaud that contained some important changes (see Volume II, note 29 of this edition). Th at was the last edition during Cottin’s lifetime; numerous posthumous editions appeared by Michaud and other publishers. No modern edition exists.23

In Cottin’s own words, Malvina is ‘somewhat the correction of [Claire d’Albe]’ because her belief that she could remain anonymous had caused her to ‘paint somewhat voluptuous colours, somewhat intense passions’. Since she had

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been recognized as the author and already suff ered a great deal because of it, she no longer wants to deprive herself of the ‘most amusing activity she has found yet’ and is therefore writing another novel.24 Th e Notice to Malvina’s fi rst edi-tion25 clarifi es that it is not the epistolary novel she announced in Claire because she fi nds the chapter format easier; thus, Malvina has an omniscient narrator and several inserted letters. It also became unintentionally longer than Claire.

In addition to format and length – which gives Malvina numerous side plots with various secondary yet important characters, such as Mr Prior, a Catholic priest who is Sir Edmond’s rival, and Malvina’s friend Mrs St Clare and her sister Louisa – other diff erences set it apart from Claire. At its core lies the confl ict between pas-sionate love and motherly (substitute) love. Th e title character – widowed young aft er an unhappy marriage in France – moves to England to join her childhood friend Clara who has married there. When Clara dies young, Malvina promises to look aft er her fi ve-year-old daughter Frances at the exclusion of all other emo-tional ties. Nevertheless, she breaks that vow when, having moved to Scotland to live with a female relative named Mrs Burton, she falls in love with and agrees to marry Mrs Burton’s libertine nephew, Sir Edmond. His subsequent infi delity liter-ally kills her, leaving him mourning at her tomb. Th e ‘correction’ Cottin wished to make in comparison with Claire likely refers to issues related to its ‘revolting immorality’: Malvina gives herself to Edmond aft er their marriage, and not while married to someone else like Claire; the chapter entitled ‘Conjugal Happiness’ does not divulge details of physical intimacy between the newlyweds, and Cottin purposely refuses to mention ‘pleasures that my pen will not risk describing’ (see Volume IV, note 27 of this edition), which contrasts sharply with the expressions of female desire and sexual pleasure present in Claire (2002, p. 148).

Although an entire chapter is devoted to a portrait of Malvina (Volume I, chapter II), Cottin gives not so much a physical description of her as a moral one: ‘as there were few women who surpassed her in beauty, there was not one who possessed superior virtue’.26 ‘Virtue’ recurs frequently in Malvina. For the heroine it consists in fulfi lling her vow to Clara of being a substitute mother to Fanny, and avoiding the fault of choosing passionate love over maternal love. Once she commits that fault and abandons virtue, Malvina is depicted as suff er-ing from Clara’s death and the cruelty of others, such as Sir Edmond who betrays their marriage vows, Kitty Fenwick who assists him in doing so and Mrs Burton who takes away Fanny. Th is confi rms April Alliston’s argument that

Th e virtue of eighteenth-century heroines … does not consist, like manly virtue, in the performance of good deeds or serviceable actions, but rather in the avoidance of fault. Now, the avoidance of fault entails the avoidance of anything resembling a deed … Hence the classical virtue of agency comes to be replaced by a feminine virtue of suff ering, both in the current sense and in the earlier one of passivity, or ‘suff ering’ the action of others. Th at suff ering in turn not only justifi es but demands the reader’s sympathetic interest. Th us heroines are interesting when they are victims’27

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Modern readers raised with the tenets of feminism, however, may fi nd such her-oines interesting primarily as refl ecting the gender politics of their times.

Gender and its politics fi gure prominently in Malvina. Substitute mother-hood and female friendship, both of which played a crucial role in Cottin’s own life, lend essential meaning to Malvina’s existence. Her lifelong friendship with Clara helps both women negotiate patriarchy, marriage and (substitute) mother-hood.28 Malvina subsequently experiences the power of female friendship again with Mrs St Clare – a woman bearing the same name and writing novels to earn a living in order to pay for her sister – who has been seduced and impregnated by Sir Edmond. Mrs St Clare’s cautionary tale about Sir Edmond does not deter Malvina from marrying him however – an instance where female friendship does not succeed in combatting patriarchy and male prerogative. Malvina believes her love will cure Sir Edmond of his libertinism and pays for this mistake with her life. Mrs St Clare embodies additional commentary by Cottin on gender. Volume II, chapter VI, entitled ‘Preface’ and omitted from the second (Michaud) edition onwards, presents and then criticizes Mrs St Clare for being a female novelist. Malvina condemns novel-writing as a useless occupation for women who should not enter the public sphere once they become wives and mothers29 whereas Mrs St Clare defends herself by saying that women ‘can more particularly understand and delineate all the characteristics of sentiment, which is in some degree the history of their lives’.30 Th e resulting confl ict between ‘femininity versus fame’ represents a major paradox in Cottin’s own life.31 Th e author also demonstrates gender consciousness in diff erentiating between readers of both sexes. When Kitty Fenwick sets out to seduce Sir Edmond (again) in Volume IV, chapter VI aft er his marriage to Malvina, Cottin refuses to indicate whether Kitty succeeds – fearing that men would not believe her failure while women would detest her success. In order not to displease readers of either sex, Cottin leaves the question unanswered yet admits that as a woman, she is happy ‘believing, that he resisted the seducing arts of Mrs Fenwick, and remained faithful to Malvina’.

Cottin enjoyed reading and music. She was a singer, composer and musician, playing the piano, harp and harmonica.32 Not surprisingly then, Malvina includes numerous literary and musical references in addition to the biblical ones inspired by Cottin’s Protestant faith. Th e novel’s protagonist owes her name to Scottish poet James Macpherson’s character Ossian.33 Because of their shared interest in Ossian, Mr Prior teaches Malvina the Erse language so she might read the original text, and then falls in love with her. Additional literary references to both French and foreign poetry, and fi ction from various centuries come from Dryden, Shake-speare, Rowe, Chamfort, Addison, Richardson, Sterne, Montaigne, Rousseau and Riccoboni, among others. Cottin also read her female colleagues Charrière, Staël, Ducos and Genlis. Music matters in the novel both in the love plot and in Malvi-na’s fi nal therapy; Cottin demonstrates her knowledge of music history as well as

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of various operas. Art is also discussed, particularly paintings of the Italian and French skies that Mrs Burton prefers to the real, forbidding Scottish skies.

Th e description of Mrs Burton’s castle in Scotland34 as having ‘Gothic gran-deur’ that ‘was increased by the loft y mountains covered with snow, which towered above it’ (p. 6) links Malvina to the tradition of Gothic fi ction – a cat-egory of Romantic literature in the vein of Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765) and Ann Radcliff e’s oeuvre, later followed by Frankenstein (1818), for instance. Initially inspired by medieval buildings and ruins, the genre focuses on death, darkness and decay. Gothic fi ction is usually set in old (haunted) cas-tles that oft en correspond to haunted minds and its themes may include masks, isolation, madness, ghosts, the church and clergy, disease and eroticism. While Mrs Burton’s castle provides the classic Gothic setting,35 various other motifs enhance Malvina’s ties to the genre. Th us, Mrs St Clare’s pregnant sister Louisa is imprisoned in a tower by her husband, Malvina falls victim to madness, Sir Edmond suff ers from a lengthy and nearly fatal disease during which Malvina cares for him wearing the mask of a nurse, Sir Edmond’s libertine impulses pro-voke his promiscuity, Mr Prior as a clergyman in love represents religion’s decay, and the novel begins and ends with a tomb – to mention but a few.

Th e translator of Malvina, Elizabeth Gunning (1769–1823), comes from a literary family background. She was the only child of Susannah Minifi e Gunning, who wrote several novels36 – some of them in collaboration with her sister Mar-garet – both before her marriage and aft er her separation from Elizabeth’s father, John Gunning, a general who distinguished himself during the Battle of Bunker Hill in 1775. On her father’s side, Elizabeth also had the novelist Lady Charlotte Bury as a younger cousin. Elizabeth grew up in Edinburgh without her father while he was fi ghting in the war in America. Nothing is known about her education, but given that she was an only child with a novelist mother who was not writing at the time, her mother likely became involved in her education at home. Her mother belonged to the English gentry, and her father, whose sisters – the ‘beautiful Gun-ning sisters’ – married into the nobility, belonged to the Irish gentry.

In 1790–1, Elizabeth found herself at the centre of a scandal that Horace Walpole nicknamed the ‘Gunninghiad’ and that divided her family permanently. Exact details of the story remain elusive, but in late 1790 Elizabeth announced her engagement to the marquis of Blandford, heir to the duke of Marlborough and a brilliant prospect. When no wedding date had been set several months later, her father inquired with the duke of Marlborough. Th e latter’s reply, as well as letters from the marquis himself, were found to be forgeries and the engagement fake. Elizabeth’s father and contemporary public opinion accused her and her mother of being the forgers, but given his own fi nancial problems, modern scholars con-sider him just as likely a culprit. Elizabeth and her mother became estranged from him over this, and they moved away. Later rumours implied Elizabeth actually

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loved the marquis of Lorn and had tried to produce a rival for her aff ections so he would propose to her. Th e matter, complete with further public accusations and defence letters, including those by Elizabeth’s mother who always remained on her side and by a relative of her father’s who was involved, became media fodder and Elizabeth fell victim to intense public debates, pamphlets and caricatures.37 Her father was later sued by his mistress’s husband and left the country immedi-ately and permanently – perhaps also afraid of forgery charges. He died abroad in 1797, but did leave his wife and daughter an inheritance. While Elizabeth and her mother travelled in France, they met Irish Major James Plunkett, who had fl ed there in order to avoid the death sentence he had received for his role in the 1798 Irish Rebellion. Elizabeth married him in 1803 aft er her mother died in 1800.

A few years aft er the scandal, Elizabeth became a very prolifi c novelist and translator, producing eleven novels, fi ve translations from the French and three books of children’s stories over the course of her career. Due to her Irish family ties and her early novels also appearing in Dublin, she is occasionally considered an Irish author, but she did not live in Ireland for any extended period. Her fi rst novel, Th e Packet (1794), refers to the scandal in both preface and plot and was well received.38 Aft er her mother died, Elizabeth found an unfi nished novel by her, which she completed and published in 1802 as Th e Heir Apparent. Her novels have been described as ‘sentimental, with heavy-footed humour, trite moralizing, a self-consciously elaborate style, and intense class-consciousness’.39 Among her translations from the French, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds stands out in that its topic comes from the domain of science. However, framed by an introduction from the male astronomer Lalande and by Fontenelle’s own preface, Elizabeth’s translation – in a version of the book edited by Lalande – does not make her a scientist, revealing her presence merely in ‘a little learned footnot-ing’ and qualifying her rather as a ‘facilitator in scientifi c knowledge exchange’.40

Th e majority of Elizabeth’s oeuvre appeared before her marriage, four works (three of them translations, including Malvina) came out in the year of her marriage (1803) and the remainder later during her marriage. A publication gap exists spanning 1804 through early 1808, which likely corresponds to the period when Elizabeth had (some of her) children being newly married and in her mid- to late-thirties. It is agreed that she had a large family, but the details remain unclear; one very detailed source suggests fi ve children may have been born – three sons and twin daughters.41

Aft er a severe illness, Elizabeth died at Melford House in Long Melford, Suf-folk, on 20 July 1823, aged fi ft y-four.42In her obituary, Gentleman’s Magazine called her ‘a lady endowed with many virtues, and considerable accomplishments’.43

Modern scholars have been studying the international networks among Enlight-enment women writers, readers and translators in order to identify and classify their contributions to the transmission of ideas and the globalization of the literary

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marketplace.44 Malvina off ers another illustration of the importance of such a trans-national approach. Although Gunning visited France and Cottin visited England, no record exists of their meeting or correspondence. Nevertheless, this translation creates a link between them that highlights specifi cally the importance of gender in such networks – particularly in female-authored novels translated by women.

Gunning’s fi rst translation of a (male-authored) French text, Memoirs of Mad-ame de Barneveldt, appeared in 1795. In its Advertisement Gunning states that she

fl atters herself that the trifl ing alterations she has thought it necessary to make from the original work having nothing to do with the historical, characteristical, political, or critical parts of it, will meet with indulgence, particularly from her own sex, who cer-tainly cannot be displeased that female delicacy should be preserved in all its purity45

Th is brief declaration exposes the complex relationships at play between trans-lator, reader, gender and text, demonstrating Gunning’s awareness of, and sensitivity to, contemporary gender issues as they relate to her translations.

Superfi cially, Gunning’s Malvina conforms quite closely to the French original. Th e translator made numerous minor changes but very few major ones, such as altering Malvina’s age from twenty-one to twenty-fi ve, implying diff erent English standards for women living alone. She omitted some verse recitals, songs and many French footnotes ranging from Cottin defending textual choices she had made (for Malvina’s portrait, Mr Prior’s language) and the sources of quotations (literary, bibli-cal) to features of Scotland more familiar to English than French readers (religion, belief in magic). Given its length, Gunning made very few mistakes (grammar, syntax, vocabulary) in the translation; she eff ected some minor corrections to the French (see, for instance, Volume I, chapter I and Volume II, chapter XII). However, on the surface the French and English texts resemble each other closely.

In terms of gender though, Gunning’s Malvina includes important changes as ‘female delicacy’ reasserts its central role in – ironically – her fi rst translation of a woman’s text. While Cottin had wanted to scale back Claire d’Albe’s ‘volup-tuous colours’ and ‘intense passions’ in Malvina, Gunning reduces them further still. She deletes passionate expressions such as ‘[Malvina’s] breast … agitated by the same passion burning in his’ (Volume II, chapter XV) and ‘transported by her beauty and avid for pleasure’ (Volume IV, chapter III), comments on the power of love (particularly Malvina’s love for the libertine Sir Edmond), on the impossibility of resisting love and on ‘conjugal happiness’ (Volume IV, chapter III). Undoubtedly so that ‘female delicacy should be preserved in all its purity’, the extensive details of Kitty’s seduction of married Sir Edmond and her being ‘half nude and in a state of the most voluptuous abandon’ (Volume IV, chap-ter VIII) are equally missing from the translation. Cottin herself seems to have become ever more sensitized to these issues, because starting with the second (Michaud) edition she omits the seduction details from the French original.

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In further gender-related changes, Gunning presents women writers in a more favourable light than Cottin. In the ‘Preface’ chapter on women writers (Volume II, chapter VI) – also later omitted – she translates Mrs St Clare as not know-ing any woman writer to have attained success in a genre other than sentimental fi ction. Cottin, however, had added a lengthy footnote elaborating and claiming no woman had written ‘a philosophical work, a play, or indeed one of those large productions that demand long and thoughtful refl ection and that could be ranked with those of our second-rate male writers’. She attributes this to Nature equipping women’s hearts and men’s minds better – all of which Gunning omits. Addition-ally, Gunning does not extend the absence of genius to all women, like Cottin, but only to certain women, and blames women’s lack of education for it, unlike Cot-tin. Th ey both wonder whether women should write at all if it is merely ‘to display their inadequacy’ (Cottin) or ‘to display their talents’ (Gunning). Gunning’s more positive and Cottin’s confl icted opinions about women writers might be attrib-uted in part to the former’s literary family history and the latter’s infl uence from Rousseau; once more, the translation already anticipates the second (Michaud) French edition in its revised, less harsh criticism of women writers.

Cottin and Gunning’s diff ering opinions on women writers appear to extend to their entire sex. When Malvina attends a ball trying to forget Sir Edmond, Gunning translates that she is above trying to make Sir Edmond jealous by pay-ing attention to another man, but omits Cottin’s sexist comment that ‘[Malvina] is a woman and that word restores all my doubts’ (Volume II, chapter VIII). Th ey also regard motherhood diff erently: while Cottin, a substitute mother her-self, calls Malvina Fanny’s ‘mother’ when Mrs Burton takes her away (Volume IV, chapter X), Gunning, who had not given birth yet when she translated Malvina, describes her as ‘[Fanny’s] more than mother’ implying that for her, Malvina as a substitute mother had gone above and beyond the call of motherhood.

Men also receive diff erent treatment from Cottin and Gunning. Gunning depicts men less negatively overall, perhaps in an eff ort to please her male readers or not frighten the female ones as much. Whereas Cottin identifi es with women by saying ‘our sex’ when discussing how feeling sincere aff ection prevents women from straying unlike men, Gunning’s translation states merely ‘women’ in gen-eral, excluding herself in the fi rst person and thus not antagonizing male readers as directly (Volume IV, chapter VI). Also, whereas Cottin claims in the ‘Preface’ chapter that love does not matter as much in men’s lives as in women’s lives, Gunning does not concur and states that men merely have more trouble writing about the topic. And when Gunning refers to ‘the inconstancy of man’, she omits Cottin’s elaboration on the subject and her condemnation of Sir Edmond’s inconstancy in Volume IV, chapter VI, as well as her footnote listing unfaith-ful male protagonists in literature. Th is list is followed by ‘etc. etc. etc. etc.’ to indicate their prevalence, but all ‘etc.’s are – again – deleted from the second

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(Michaud) edition onwards. Instead, Gunning creates a new paragraph explain-ing why Sir Edmond, lacking humility, was seduced a second time by Kitty.

Cottin’s Malvina in translation by Gunning exemplifi es how French and British women contributed to the globalization of the early nineteenth-century literary marketplace, disseminating French cultural capital to Britain. Although a female-authored text, the most signifi cant changes Malvina underwent in translation are in fact gender-related: Gunning portrays women, women writers and men more positively than Cottin, while simultaneously aiming to protect ‘female delicacy’ more vigorously by reducing or eliminating expressions and scenes of passion and (extramarital) seduction. Ironically, Cottin had set a similar goal for herself in writing Malvina, and she implemented several of Gun-ning’s changes in her own later edition.

Notes 1. It contains Frances Brooke’s 1760 translation of Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Lettres de Juli-

ette Catesby (Letters fr om Juliette Catesby) and Miss Roberts’s 1774 Th e Peruvian Letters, a translation of Françoise de Graffi gny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne (Letters fr om a Peruvian Woman) as well as a continuation, followed by Roberts’s own continuation.  

2. See C. Cazenobe, ‘Une préromantique méconnue: Madame Cottin’, Travaux de littéra-ture, 1 (1988), pp. 175–202, on p. 177.  

3. Infertility is the theme of one of the rare modern full-length critical studies of Cottin’s oeuvre by M. J. Call: Infertility and the Novels of Sophie Cottin (2002).  

4. See the ‘Correspondence’ section in the Bibliography. Articles by Roulston (‘Gender-ing the Self in Eighteenth-Century Women’s Letters’) and Cusset (‘“Ceci n’est point une lettre”’: échange épistolaire et mystique de la transparence. Le cas de Sophie Cottin (1770–1807)’) examine Cottin’s correspondence specifi cally.  

5. For a correspondence-based study of this journey, see my article ‘Femininity, Fame, Faith and Philosophy: Sophie Cottin’s 1806 Voyage to Italy’.  

6. L. C. Sykes provides detailed biographical information – see: Madame Cottin (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1949). S. Spencer’s 2005 article (‘Sophie Cottin’) presents the most re-cent biography and bibliography.  

7. Gynographs: French Novels by Women of the Late Eighteenth Century (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 186. 

8. See R. P. Th omas ‘Arranged Marriages and Marriage Arrangements in Eighteenth-Cen-tury French Novels by Women’ (Women in French Studies, 14 (2006), pp. 37–49) for an analysis of this arranged marriage.  

9. Stewart, Gynographs, pp. 172–5. 10. See M. Cohen, Th e Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-

versity Press, 1999), p. 47. On the genre, also see B. Louichon, Romancières sentimentales (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2009).  

11. See C. Hesse, Th e Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp. 142–5.  

12. See my article (‘Femininity, Fame, Faith and Philosophy’) and C. Cusset (‘Rousseau’s Legacy: Glory and Femininity at the End of the Eighteenth Century: Sophie Cottin and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’). R. Trousson presents Claire d’Albe as a rewriting of Rousseau’s Julie (‘Sophie Cottin disciple indocile de Jean-Jacques Rousseau’); S. Spencer ascribes to

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the former a ‘more audacious female morality’ (‘“Reading in Pairs”: La Nouvelle Héloïse and Claire d’Albe’, Romance Languages Annual, 7 (1995), pp. 166–72, on p. 170).  

13. By Cazenobe (‘Une préromantique méconnue: Madame Cottin’) and Bertrand-Jennings (Un autre mal du siècle: le romantisme des romancières, 1800–1846), among others.  

14. Sykes, Madame Cottin, pp. 224–8. 15. Elisabeth and its reception in the United States into the twentieth century form an ex-

ception (See Spencer ‘Sophie Cottin’, pp. 113–14).  16. Sykes, Madame Cottin, p. 256. 17. Sykes, Madame Cottin, p. 258. 18. Cazenobe and Trousson in Europe, and Stewart and Spencer in the United States, for

instance.  19. Sykes, Madame Cottin, p. 322. 20. Sykes, Madame Cottin, pp. 399–400. 21. Sykes, Madame Cottin, pp. 44, 401. 22. Sykes, Madame Cottin, p. 401. 23. H. Krief ’s Vivre libre et écrire contains some excerpts of Malvina, as well as a useful intro-

duction about female novelists during the Revolution.  24. Sykes, Madame Cottin, p. 330. 25. Reproduced in the editorial notes (Volume I, note 3) to Malvina.  26. We note here that although Cottin describes Malvina twice as having ‘cheveux blonds’

(‘blond hair’), Gunning gives her ‘light brown’ and ‘auburn’ hair, respectively.  27. A. Alliston, Virtue’s Faults: Correspondences in Eighteenth-Century British and French

Women’s Fiction (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 86. 28. See J. Todd’s study on the role of women’s friendship in literature: Women’s Friendship in

Literature (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1980).  29. Th is criticism includes women composers – see Volume II, note 29.  30. On the diff erent implications of this for men and women, see Cohen, Th e Sentimental

Education of the Novel, p. 47.  31. See the section by that name in my article ‘Femininity, Fame, Faith and Philosophy’ for

a summary of various critics’ analyses.  32. Sykes, Madame Cottin, p. 20. 33. See Volume I, note 32 for details.  34. On the role of Scotland in Malvina, see P. Pelckmans, ‘L’Écosse des romancières’.  35. See the article by R. Craig on how Cottin uses the castle as Gothic and libertine spaces

in her sentimental novel to create an early Romantic hybrid.  36. Th ey are described as ‘exceedingly harmless; an absence of plot forming their most origi-

nal characteristic’ (Dictionary of National Biography, vol. 23, p. 349).  37. See the articles by P. Perkins (‘Th e Fictional Identities of Elizabeth Gunning’) and T.

Beebee (‘Publicity, Privacy, and the Power of Fiction in the Gunning Letters’) for more background on the scandal.  

38. Perkins considers it an eff ort to redeem the author’s image in the public eye.  39. I. Grundy, ‘Gunning, Elizabeth (1769–1823)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biog-

raphy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11745 [accessed 21 July 2014]. 

40. A. E. Martin ‘“No Tincture of Learning?’” Aphra Behn as (Re)Writer and Translator’, UCL Translation in History Lectures (24 October 2013), at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/translation-studies/translation-in-history/documents/Martin-Aphra-Behn-pdf [accessed 21 July 2014]. 

41. Notes and Queries, 6th series, vol. 4 (30 July 1881), p. 89. 

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42. Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles fr om the Beginnings to the Present off ers detailed biographical and bibliographical information (eds S. Brown, P. Clements and I. Grundy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Online, 2006), at http://orlando. cambridge.org/ [accessed March 25 2014]).  

43. Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle, vol. 93, part 2 (August 1823), p. 190. 44. See for instance S. van Dijk (ed.), WomenWriters, at http://neww.huygens.knaw.nl/ [ac-

cessed 23 March 2015] and the volumes that G. Dow co-edited: Women Readers in Eu-rope: Readers, Writers, Salonnières, 1750–1900, special issue of Women’s Writing, 18:1 (February 2011).  

45. E. Gunning Plunkett, Memoirs of Madame de Barneveldt, Translated fr om the French (London: Low; Booker, 1795). 

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