ABSTRACT
This chapter opens with a discussion of the preview of her first novel Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd that Marie Jeanne Riccoboni published in the 1757 Mercure de France; the monograph Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice has authenticated it as being autobiographical. It is followed by an overview of some of the letters Marijn S. Kaplan previously uncovered and identified as having been written by Riccoboni, for instance on female suicide, and an analysis of how they are connected to what Kaplan terms her “epistolary feminism,” epistolarity used to promote proto-feminism. Studies are presented of Riccoboni’s (relatively) unknown letters to David Garrick’s valet Antonio Carara, Diderot’s son-in-law Abel François Nicolas Caroillon de Vandeul, and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre. All letters discussed are included in the Appendix to Marie Jeanne Riccoboni’s Epistolary Feminism: Fact, Fiction, and Voice, originals and translations.
