REVIEWS — FS, LIV-4, 2OOO 5 21 recur in endless variation'. Purdy, however, goes on largely to ignore Stendhal's other works in his otherwise interesting essay on possible analogies between Le Rouge and hypertext, leaving it instead to Mary Anne O'Neil to demonstrate how students' understanding of the novel's problematic denouement can effectively be informed by simple links to De I'amour. „ FRANCESCO MANZINI

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/fs/article/LIV/4/521-a/544457 by guest on 27 September 2021

MARCELLNE DESBORDES-VALMORE: Huitfemmts. Nouvelles presentees par MARC BERTRAND. (Textes litteraires francais, 505). Geneva, Droz, 1999. 251pp. This collection has always been difficult to find: its first and only publication was in 1845, anc^ it's n°t even in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Nevertheless, it is of interest to at least two categories of scholars. First, to those charting the development of one of France's outstanding female poets, since it spans Desbordes-Valmore's youthful and mature poetic periods (1821—45). The two earliest tales are rather melodramatic and loosely structured, while the later ones are much neater and more humorous. Thus SaJ/y, the 1836 story of a grasping master who marries a witless servant in die mistaken belief that she has won the lottery, shows a talent for burlesque that counteracts the stereotype of Desbordes-Valmore as 'Notre-Dame-des-Pleurs' (Luden Descaves's phrase). Second, for students of wider issues, the tales encapsulate themes common in French women's writing in the first half of the nineteenth century, and sometimes have a decidedly feminist slant. (The majority were in fact written during a peak period of French feminism, 1836—45; Desbordes-Valmore herself was a subscriber to Flora Tristan's socialist and feminist Union ouvriere, 1843.) So the narrators may explicidy compare women to servants and more especially slaves; and standard plots, figuring — say — arranged marriage or infidelity, are recast in such a way as to show a new liberalism in at least some men, or 'justifications' of apparently flighty women {Anna, Fanelly). Like many of her contemporaries, Desbordes-Valmore depicts Nordic women as enjoying relative freedom: particularly in Britain, where a number of the stories are located, but also in Sweden — Christine indicates the emancipatory legacy of Queen Christina, one of nineteenth-century French women's 'role-models'. The heroine, a namesake of the Queen's, is 'savante', can beat men at chess, and the King, although in love with her, lets her marry the man of her choice. This volume, then, joins the steadily increasing flow of nineteenth-century French women's texts republished since 1970, continuing to break down that silence about the 'other half of nineteenth-century French literature that until recently had the critical establishment in its grip. . „ 0 ALISON FINCH MERTON COLLEGE, OXFORD

ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE: Toussaint Louverture. Presentation et notes de LEON- FRANCOIS HOFFMANN. (Textes litteraires, 104). University of Exeter Press, 1998. xliii + 16} pp. This welcome edition of Lamartine's long-neglected 'pogme dramatique et populaire. . .[destine] a un theatre melodramatique du boulevard' (his words)