Claire d'Albe: The Original French Text (MLA Texts and Translations) - Softcover

"Claire d'Albe is an excellent choice for the series. In the early years of the nineteenth century, this novel was both highly successful and scandalous. It belongs to important literary and intellectual traditions and would work well in a course tracing the history of French literature in the period, especially as an example of women's writing." --English Showalter, professor emeritus of French, Rutgers University

Both Claire and her husband, M. d'Albe, are virtuous and upstanding, and Frederic, her husband's nineteen-year-old adopted son and factory assistant, is honest and noble-hearted. But in the beautiful and secluded Loire Valley, the friendship between Claire and Frederic gradually develops into a forbidden passion. Claire d'Albe (1799) was audacious in its day for its representation of adulterous love as a positive act of self-fulfillment. As the volume editor, Margaret Cohen, indicates, Sophie Cottin's best-selling work of sentimentalism highlights the tension in Enlightenment liberalism between collective welfare and personal happiness. Although such later French authors as Stendhal and Balzac denigrated sentimentalism along with female novelists, Claire d'Albe influenced their realist aesthetics.