Eugénie et Mathilde by Madame de Souza.
Edited by Kirsty Carpenter

MHRA Critical Texts Vol. 26
ISBN 978-1-907322-13-6
Summer 2011
Pbk £12.99 / $24.99 / EUR19.99

Illustration from 'La Chastelaine du Vergier'

The purpose of this book is to make available to scholars and students the most important of Madame de Souza’s novels in a way that the French Revolution or political context could be fully understood alongside the literary and social references within the text.

This novel was written at the height of Madame de Souza’s writing career, and was received with acclaim from those who had experienced emigration, by Parisian society generally and by the European literary elite of the time. Eugénie et Mathilde is very well suited to critique and study by students of French as it has a style and plot that illustrate the transition from the epistolary novel of the eighteenth century to the third-person style of the nineteenth century.

This edition provides a text which should sit alongside Madame de Staël’s Corinne as one of the most provocative novels of the period because it questioned the moral foundations of family and society without attracting censorship. This in itself was a more major achievement than is initially apparent to the reader who is unfamiliar with the subtleties of Napoleonic censorship.

Kirsty Carpenter is Senior Lecturer in History at Massey University.

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Eugénie et Mathilde by Madame de Souza. Edited by Kirsty Carpenter

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Eugénie et Mathilde by Madame de Souza.
Edited by Kirsty Carpenter