ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the final letters written by Marie Jeanne Riccoboni and published during her lifetime—but not necessarily with her consent. They include a relatively long letter Riccoboni wrote to the British author Philip Thicknesse—unexamined by modern scholars—and better-known ones to Laclos, the author of Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782). Marijn S. Kaplan connects what she terms their “epistolary feminism,” epistolarity used to promote proto-feminism, back to Riccoboni’s fiction and assesses their significance in the overall context of her life and work. All letters discussed are included in the Appendix to Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice, originals and translations.
