J. Hinde Stewart, The Enlightenment of Age: Women, letters and growing old in eighteenth-century France

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Joan Hinde Stewart, The Enlightenment of Age: Women, letters and growing old in eighteenth-century France.

Foreword by Joan DeJean

Oxford : Voltaire Foundation, coll. "SVEC", 2010.

284 p.

Prix : 70EUR.

EAN : 9780729410014.

Présentation de l'éditeur :

‘Women seem to be destined solely for our pleasure. When they no longerhave that attraction, they have lost everything' (letter from Diderot to Sophie Volland, 1762). How typical was this view ofthe ‘older woman' in the eighteenth century?

By studying thecorrespondences of four prominent women (Françoise de Graffigny, Marie DuDeffand, Marie Riccoboni and Isabelle de Charrière) during their middle andlate years, Stewart explores the relation of female aging to respectability,sexuality and power. The author's focus lies in the physical, emotional andprofessional well-being of middle-aged and elderly women during a time when allthe available dignity of age seemed to belong to men. The ‘repulsiveness' ofgrowing old was patently a female issue.

One of the most emblematicaspects of these correspondences is the often unrequited love of older womenfor younger men. Stewart juxtaposestheir letters with representations of aging women in the period's fictional andmedical literature. She takes up several canonical, mostly male-authored, texts that purvey this common wisdom, and re-reads them withoriginality and grace.

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