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Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni (25 October 1713 in Paris - 7 December 1792 in Paris), whose maiden name was Laboras de Mézières, was a French actress and novelist.

Early years

She was born in Paris in 1713.

Career

In 1735, she married Antoine François Riccoboni, a comedian and dramatist, from whom she soon separated. She herself was an actress and had moderate success on the stage.

Madame Riccoboni's work is among the most eminent examples of the "sensibility" novel; among the parallels cited in English literature are works by Laurence Sterne and Samuel Richardson. A still nearer parallel may be found in the work of Henry Mackenzie. Her works were also described as "letter novel" containing the negotiations of femininity, desire, and ambition. She has influenced other writers, including Pierre Choderlos de Laclos and his literary aesthetics.

She obtained a small pension from the crown, but the Revolution deprived her of it, and she died in Paris on 7 December 1792 in great poverty.

Writer

Riccoboni's first novel was Les Lettres de Mistris Fanni Butlerd (1757), which explored the functional exclusion of women from the public sphere. She is also noted for publishing Les Lettres de Juliette Catesby in 1759. Its translation by Frances Brooke into English the following year became an immediate success in England so that it went through six editions. Apart from authoring the works listed below, Riccoboni was the editor of a periodical, L'Abeille (1761), wrote a novel (1762) on the subject of Fielding's Amelia, and supplied in 1765 a continuation (but not the conclusion sometimes erroneously ascribed to her) of Marivaux's unfinished Marianne. Riccoboni also corresponded with Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, author of Les Liaisons Dangeureuses, as well as David Hume and the theater celebrity David Garrick (see J.C. Nicholls, ed. Madame Riccoboni’s letters to David Hume, David Garrick, and Sir Robert Liston : 1764-1783, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation, 1976). Her letters to these personalities, including the diplomat Robert Liston, provided an account of life in France during the latter part of the eighteenth century.

Some of her better known works are:

Lettres de mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757)
the remarkable Histoire du marquis de Cressy (1758)
Les Lettres de Juliette Catesby (1759), an epistolary novel appreciated by Voltaire and translated into English by Frances Brooke in 1760
l'Histoire d'Ernestine (1765), which La Harpe thought her masterpiece
three series of Lettres in the names of:
- Adelaide de Dammartin (comtesse de Sancerre) (2 vol., 1766)
- Elizabeth Sophie de Valliere (2 vol., 1772)
- Milord Rivers (2 vol., 1776)

References

Jensen, Katharine Ann (1995). Writing Love: Letters, Women, and the Novel in France, 1605-1776. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. p. 126. ISBN 0-8093-1849-0.
Sol, Antoinette Marie (2002). Textual Promiscuities: Eighteenth-century Critical Rewriting. Bucknell University Press. p. 7. ISBN 978-0-8387-5500-6.
Cook, Elizabeth (1996). Epistolary Bodies: Gender and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Republic of Letters. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. p. 114. ISBN 978-0-8047-6486-5.
^ Donkin, Ellen (2005-08-03). Getting Into the Act: Women Playwrights in London 1776-1829. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-134-89085-9.
Fellows, Otis; Carr, Diana (1981). Diderot Studies. Geneva: Librairie Droz. p. 375. ISBN 978-2-600-03940-6.

Sources

This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Riccoboni, Marie Jeanne". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 23 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 290.

External links

Media related to Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni at Wikimedia Commons
Works by or about Marie Jeanne Riccoboni at the Internet Archive
Works by or about Laboras de Mezières at the Internet Archive
Association Riccoboni, biographical details, mainly in French.

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