In 1598, Marie Le Jars de Gournay, a friend of Montaigne and the editor of his Essais, moved to Paris and embarked on her own career as a woman of letters. The story of her struggle, and her own published reflections on the subject of ‘she who writes’, anticipate many of the issues that would concern women writers throughout the seventeenth century. Although initially intending to follow in the footsteps of her mentor, Gournay became progressively more interested in the particular challenges faced by women who chose a public voice. Her treatise Egalité des hommes et des femmes (1622) focused on the importance of education for women. Her essay Grief des dames (1626) describes the experience of speaking with a woman's voice to a male public that is reluctant to listen. The many editions of her single work of fiction, Le Proumenoir de Montaigne, in itself constitutes a record of a woman writer's struggle with editors and censors. In the last edition that she published of Le Proumenoir, Gournay appended an essay entitled Apologie pour celle qui escrit, defending herself against the slanders that had plagued her life and threatened her livelihood. The hostility and derision that plagued Marie de Gournay's career may have contributed to a more ambivalent approach to publishing expressed by writers later in the century. Anne-Thérèse de Lambert's treatises on women's education and equality, composed in the 1690s, were circulated privately and only published, without her knowledge, over thirty years later.