I

Through the motif of translation and continuation this book connects four Enlightenment women writers from two countries and affecting three national literatures, thus partaking in the relatively recent trend within academia for recuperating from silence the voices of forgotten women writers and tracing the networks among them. It presents English translations of two of the most popular eighteenth-century French novels written by women, Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's 1759 Lettres de Milady Juliette Catesby à Milady Henriette Campley, son amie translated by Frances Brooke as Letters from Juliet Lady Catesby to her Friend Lady Henrietta Campley (1760) and Françoise de Graffigny's 1747 Lettres d'une Péruvienne translated by Miss R. Roberts as Letters Written by a Peruvian Princess (1774). The latter is followed by a second volume containing Roberts's translation of an anonymous 1748 French continuation to Graffigny's novel, Suite des Lettres d'une Péruvienne (Continuation to the Letters from a Peruvian Woman), as well as her own continuation.

II

Françoise de Graffigny, née d'Happoncourt (1695–1758), the only one of these authors born during the seventeenth century, wrote one novel in addition to some stories, fables and plays. Married young and unhappily, Graffigny had three children who all died young. Separated from her abusive husband, she had a sixteen-year relationship with an officer who eventually abandoned her. Having moved to Paris from her native Lorraine, she started to write and opened a salon visited by such male luminaries as Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire. She became famous mostly for her one novel entitled Lettres d'une Péruvienne (Letters from a Peruvian Woman). This epistolary novel published in 1747 became a bestseller in France and was reprinted forty-six times over the next three decades. The Nouvelles littéraires stated that 'Il y a longtemps qu'on ne nous avait rien donné d'aussi agréable que les Lettres d'une Péruvienne.