Reading Women: from Emma Bovary to the New Woman

Abstract

The great preoccupation of French provincial women is novel-reading’, wrote Stendhal in 1832, ‘hence the immense consumption of novels that takes place in France.’ He went on: ‘In the provinces, there is scarcely a woman who does not read her five or six volumes per month; many read 15 or 20; and you would not find a small town without two or three cabinets de lecture.’¹ Stendhal’s survey of the feminine book market carefully distinguished between two kinds of readers. On one hand, there were respectable Parisian readers, who typically demanded the octavo editions of Walter Scott published by Gosselin ± novels, as Stendhal put it, for the salons; on the other hand, there was the small-format ‘roman pour les femmes de chambre’, full of absurd tear-jerking scenarios for readers of the provincial petite bourgeoisie. Although the provincial woman might sometimes attempt the respectable octavo novel (roman de bonne compagnie), she would not be able entirely to understand it