Selected Philosophical, Scientific, and Autobiographical Writings

Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville combined fierce intellectual ambition with the proper demeanor of the wife of a leading magistrate. Bemoaning her lack of a formal education in childhood, as an adult she read widely, studied languages, and sought out mentors among the scientific elite of the day. Always publishing anonymously, her works included moralist philosophy, scientific and literary translations, original scientific research, fiction, and history. Recently, a trove of unpublished essays and autobiographical writings from her final years, long thought to have been lost, has come to light, revealing her as a writer of insight, wit, and feeling.

"In her edition and translation of writings by Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville (1720–1805), Julie Candler Hayes provides an important look at a remarkable woman writer, thinker, and scientist. D’Arconville was a “true woman of the Enlightenment” of wide-ranging interests, concerned with moral, societal, and philosophical issues, such as the role of self-love (amour-propre), perspectives on history, and the value of friendship versus marriage. Her published writings are extremely significant, but perhaps even more intriguing are the recently rediscovered manuscript texts that she wrote late in life, offering a glimpse into the mind of this fascinating woman who was married at a very early age, took charge of her own education, and outlived the Revolution."

-Sharon Diane Nell, Professor of French and Dean of the School of Humanities, St. Edward’s University

JULIE CANDLER HAYES is Professor of French and Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her most recent book is Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600–1800 (2009); she is currently working on a monograph about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women moral philosophers.

REVIEWS
Early Modern Women 14.2 (2020): 161–164. Reviewed by Anne R. Larsen.
French Studies 74.3 (2020), pp. 463–464. Reviewed by Jonathan Simon.
Modern Language Review 118.3 (2023): 390–392. Reviewed by Emma Marie Dunne.
Renaissance & Reformation 42.3 (2019): 264–266. Reviewed by Jess Allen.