Madame de graffigny biography books

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The story of Françoise de Graffigny’s life reads like a novel.

Madame helvétius

Madame helvétius

Letters from a Peruvian Woman · Lettres D'Une Peruvienne (Texts and Translations: Texts, No 2) · Lettres Portugaises Lettres Dune Peruvie.

Ben franklin and madame helvétius

Françoise de Graffigny, better known as Madame de Graffigny, was a French novelist, playwright and salon hostess.

The story of Françoise de Graffigny's life reads like a novel.

Following a disastrous marriage, she was forced by political upheavals to leave her native Lorraine and move to Paris, where she struggled to survive against poverty and persecution. Here she made her way into the heart of literary society in the heyday of the Enlightenment, wrote a novel – the Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747) – that made her an international celebrity, wrote a play – Cénie (1750) – that ranked among the ten most successful new plays of the century, and became a noted salon hostess.

Yet fifty years after her death she was almost forgotten, and has been rediscovered only in the last few decades. Now her novel is widely read once more, and studied as a masterpiece. At the same time, a vast collection of her