Word: vigne
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Virginia Woolf celebrated Mme. de Sévigné in a lyrical essay: "This great lady, this robust and fertile letter writer, who in our age would probably have been one of the great novelists ..." Thornton Wilder sketched an invidious portrait of the 17th century French author in The Bridge of San Luis Rey; the poet Alphonse Lamartine called her the Petrarch of French prose; Proust compared her art to Dostoyevsky...
These testimonials notwithstanding, Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, Marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696), remains lamentably little known in America. There is still no fullscale, modern biography in English and no satisfactory selection of her more than a thousand collected letters. Frances Mossiker's Madame de Sévigné: A Life and Letters fills neither gap, but it does provide an intriguing look at fragments of the great lady's correspondence...