Women in French Studies

Marie Jeanne Riccoboni boldly went public in a relatively unknown 1768 letter addressed to Pierre-Antoine de la Place, the editor of the Mercure de France, wishing to rectify a capital error propagated in l'Esprit des femmes célèbres by Pons-Augustin Alletz, in which all her work had been attributed to her mother-in-law, Elena "Flaminia" Riccoboni, a talented Italian actress and author in her own right. Thus reclaiming her literary legacy in a predominantly male public forum, she confronts issues related not only to public and private but also to gender and genre, while at the same time shedding light on the littlestudied relationship between her and her mother-in-law. I will examine how Riccoboni defends and negotiates her precarious professional status as a bestselling woman writer in male-dominated Enlightenment France and will analyze the nature of the "power with a feminine touch" she uses to do so.