Franoise de Graffigny

The story of Franoise de Graffignys 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 dune Pruvienne (1747) that made her an international celebrity, wrote a play Cnie (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 letters and papers emerged, and scholars have used the ongoing edition of her Correspondance to shed important light on a long list of noted figures, such as Choiseul, Crbillon fils, Duclos, Helvtius, Palissot, Prvost, Rousseau, and Voltaire. This biography draws on those letters, including the hundreds not yet published, and on the editorial teams highly praised research, to provide the first biography in ninety years of this phenomenal woman. It provides new material on all aspects of her life, from her intimate feelings to the composition and publication of her literary works. It is by far the most complete and accurate account of Mme de Graffignys life and times.