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Biography
French

Madame de Sévigné

1626 — 1696

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné, was a French aristocrat whose letters — over 1,500 of them, written primarily to her daughter over a period of twenty-five years — are considered the greatest epistolary achievement in the French language. Published posthumously, the letters provide an unparalleled portrait of life at the court of Louis XIV and in the French provinces, written with wit, psychological acuity, and an immediacy that has kept them in print for over three centuries.

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PeriodClassical
NationalityFrench
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626–1696), was a French noblewoman whose vast correspondence — written primarily to her daughter, Françoise-Marguerite de Sévigné, Comtesse de Grignan — is the supreme monument of French epistolary art. Widowed at twenty-five, she devoted herself to her children, to Parisian society, and to the extraordinary letters that would make her posthumously famous.

The letters cover court gossip, political intrigue (including eyewitness accounts of the trial of Nicolas Fouquet and the revocation of the Edict of Nantes), literary life, family anxieties, and the textures of daily existence in seventeenth-century France. They are written with a spontaneity, humour, and emotional range that make them literature in the fullest sense — Proust was a devoted reader.

Collecting Sévigné

The first significant edition of Sévigné’s letters appeared in 1725; the definitive scholarly edition is the Pléiade Correspondance (3 volumes, Gallimard). Early French editions from the eighteenth century are collected by antiquarian dealers in French literature. English translations — most recently by Leonard Tancock (Penguin) — are modestly priced. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century editions are rare and valuable.