Desert Hawk Books

 

The Correspondence of Isabelle de Charrière and Constant d'Hermenches

There Are No Letters Like Yours

Translated and with and introduction and annotations
by
Janet Whatley
and
Malcolm Whatley

 

544  pages
6" x 9"
Hardcover

Quantity:  $29.95 & S/H  

 

"Why should I constrain myself, and refuse you something that is essentially innocent, that you've seemed ardently to desire, and which for that very reason I find pleasure in granting you?" - Isabelle de Charrière

Isabelle de Charrière (1740-1805) is best known for four of her novels: Lettres neuchateloises, Lettres de Mistriss Henley, Lettres ecrites de Lausanne, and Caliste.  These finely drawn representations of provincial courtship, marriage, and domestic life have been called the closest thing in French to the novels of Jane Austin.

A daughter of a distinguished Dutch noble family, she was known in her youth as Belle de Zuylen.  At the age of twenty she began a clandestine correspondence with a middle-aged Swiss colonel stationed in Holland.  David-Louis, Baron de Constant d'Hermenches, was a friend of Voltaire, an accomplished musician, an amateur writer, and a ladies' man.  Their correspondence was one of the finest a in a great age of letter-writing.  It lasted fifteen years, and nearly all of it is extant.

Although the two rarely saw each other, their epistolary friendship became on of great depth and scope.  Their correspondence touches on a wide range of subjects: James Boswell's courtship of Isabelle, her opinions of English high society, the new smallpox inoculation, and visits by the royalty.  It includes firsthand accounts of the French conquest of Corsica and of Voltaire's social activism.  Readers acquainted with Charrière's novels will see in these letters the same finely observed detail, epistolary style, and moral and intellectual awareness.

"The translation and publication of this engrossing correspondence between two brilliant temperaments of the Enlightenment is more than an important literary service: it provides revelation and pleasure." - Shirley Hazzard.

"The astonishing letters that Isabelle de Charrière exchanged as a young woman with a married, rakish military officer are among the most gripping correspondences of the eighteenth century. It is hard to overstate their human and historical interest, and the Whatleys' excellent translation and superb annotation do them justice. - Joan Hinde Stewart, University of South Carolina.

Janet and Malcolm Whatley live in Burlington, Vermont.  Janet Whatley is a professor of French at the University of Vermont specializing in the literature of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.