Sentimental stories of women writers in france between 1789 and 1830: Mme Cottin and her melancholic heroines

Abstract

This work is concerned with dissecting the new sensibility or amorous affectivity in the novels written by women in France during the aforementioned period. A special emotionality that impregnates the main characters, generally women, and which will take as a model Rousseau's well-known narrative La Nouvelle Héloïse, an epistolary story where its author would come to capture, like no other previous writer, the mastery in sentimental expression, being interested in feelings more than in ideas and propitiating to a great extent the triumph of Romanticism. This influence, aided by the "sensibilité" and "mélancolie" of two other writers of the time, Baculard d'Arnaud and Loaisel de Tréogate, would be noticeable in the novels written by women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in what critics would call the "roman sentimental". The "roman sentimental" would be mainly composed of Mmes Charrière, de Genlis, Krüdener, de Souza, de Duras and, obviously, Mme Cottin, the most emblematic novelist of the time. Of all these writers, she is the one who seems to assimilate in a better way the peculiarities of this type of story, which she would reflect in the ideals and dreams of her heroines, as well as the ravages produced by unhappy loves.