ABSTRACT
After discussing how the bestselling Lettres de Juliette Catesby (1759) presents the feminist poetics of voice upon which Marie Jeanne Riccoboni will build in her final three epistolary novels, Marijn S. Kaplan analyzes what she terms Riccoboni’s “epistolary feminism” epistolarity used to promote proto-feminism in the much less popular Histoire de Miss Jenny (1764). Eighteenth-century male critics received this marginally epistolary novel well, but ironically, challenged a minor male character’s unhappy ending rather than questioning the extraordinary and numerous mishaps that befall Miss Jenny, the novel’s female protagonist. Kaplan demonstrates how his unhappy ending in fact vindicates Miss Jenny’s victimization and lack of agency by triggering an unexpected, proto-feminist outcome for her that resembles Françoise de Graffigny’s icon Zilia in Lettres d’une Péruvienne (1747).
