Shirley Jones Day
The Search for Lyonnesse: Women's Fiction in France 1670-1703
New York: Peter Lang, 1999. Pp. 339. $52.95
Reviewed by Rachel Sauvé

The reference to the Arthurian realm of the Lyonnesse in this title points to Shirley Jones Day's argument that the concept of a women's literature in late-seventeenth-century France is more than a myth, and that this body of works, although it makes various uses of history as a background or a narrative device, is grounded in the tradition of the fairy tale. Jones Day, Honorary Research Fellow at University College, London, is well acquainted with the period and the writers studied here, and her point that the literary value of women's writings cannot be assessed without remapping the history of the novel should be well taken. While other important studies, including Joan DeJean's Tender Geographies (1991), Joan Hinde Stewart's Gynographs (1993), and Nancy K. Miller's French Dressing (1995), have dealt with the subject of the "heroine's text" in the ancien régime, Jones Day offers a contextualized analysis of the narrative patterns that are specific to more than fifteen works of fiction written by women in the later years of Louis XIV's reign.

First, Jones Day establishes two precursors of the feminocentric text: Mme de Villedieu, author of Les Annales galantes (1670) and Les Désordres de l'amour (1675), who rewrites women into the historical script, and Mme de La Fayette, author of La Princesse de Clèves (1678), the well-known and exceptional text that explores the role of passion across various stages of a woman's life. It features intimate and emotional dialogues between the characters, especially between husband and wife, and its conclusion, where the widowed princess relinquishes her lover to preserve her love, strays away from the plot's predictable outcome. Then, Jones Day sets out to analyze works by Mlle Bernard, Mme d'Aulnoy, and Mlle de La Force, three followers of Villedieu and La Fayette, whom she designates as "the daughters of the novel" and who enjoyed a significant popularity during their lifetime.

According to Jones Day, Mlle Bernard's major contribution is her depiction of women such as Éléonor in her novel Éléonor d'Yvrée (1687), a heroine who sees her chances to integrate into society minimized by her lack of money and status. A victim of society rather than of passion, the character of Éléonor departs from the model established by La Fayette and promoted by critics of the time. Mme d'Aulnoy goes further by foregrounding social conflicts, particularly in Histoire d'Hipolite (1690), a novel that shows society as a collective adversary of the protagonists. Mme d'Aulnoy, best-known for her contes de fées, is the most remarkable of the three writers, because she often ventures into an "aesthetics of ambiguity, of disguise and role playing" (216), one that clearly draws on the conte-de-fées tradition and that enriches the narrative through exotic or fantastic settings. Mlle de La Force uses the same devices in what is arguably her best work, Histoire secrète des amours de Henri IV (1695), which features a heroine whose moral qualities surpass her beauty.

Jones Day clearly demonstrates how women writers following Mme de La Fayette often chose to distance themselves from, or even subvert, the model she had created. By focusing on the characters and the plot, however, Jones Day's theoretical framework is somewhat restraining. As Jones Day admits herself, many of these works are quite flawed and not worth rehabilitating. Furthermore, it is disappointing to note that the author failed to give more insight into the pervasive use of equivocal disguise and relationships and to provide details on the sources used by women writers in the research for their historical novels. Nevertheless, scholars already familiar with the field will take advantage of Jones Day's "preliminary map on which further journeys of discovery might be based" (21).