ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Marijn S. Kaplan locates the source of what she terms Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s “epistolary feminism” epistolarity used to promote proto-feminism in the author’s first novel Lettres de Fanni Butlerd (1757). By manipulating fact and fiction as well as private and public in the novel, Riccoboni presents strategies to enhance female authority and the female voice that will become the hallmark of both her correspondence and her epistolary fiction. Through a diachronic analysis of various editions of the novel, Kaplan offers new evidence supporting its autobiography theory. She also settles the centuries-old question whether Riccoboni had written the letters that became Lettres de Fanni Butlerd to her lover, the comte de Maillebois.
